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.

Small businesses have a few advantages over larges businesses and one of them is the ability to market to individuals.  This is important because this form of marketing is the most successful.  Think about it, the marketing that gets to you makes you feel like it is directed for you and only you.  It begs the question-how did they know?  


Social Networks can return this advantage back to big business.  It allows the client to access customized content aligned with their interests and it provides empowerment.  The client feels like they have a voice about the relationship with the company.  A voice that is accorded the same respect as if the client was talking to the owner of a small business. 

Treat your social networks as if they are 1 on 1 conversations with your clients and you should see the client value of this resource increase dramatically.

How companies interact with clients is changing and I think it is for the better.  These changes are taking place both on the sales side and the support side of business.    


Bob Garfield’s Chaos Scenario article (http://adage.com/article?articulated=115712), does an in depth breakdown of how advertising and marketing might change due to innovation on the internet.  This article covers a lot of information but one thing that struck me was his assertion of consumer control over exposure to information. 


Garfield explains that mass media and mass marketing have had a “perfect symbiotic relationship” resulting in advertising underwriting content while content delivers an audience and audiences patronize the advertisers.  Although, this relationship between mass media and mass marketing has been around for 50 years or so, it has not been the most efficient.


In Garfield’s article, he writes about Proctor and Gamble finding a way to change their marketing.  Proctor and Gamble are not looking at finding a different place to  “amass 30 million people at a time so we can tell them not to squeeze the Charmin.”  What they are looking for is a different way to build relationships with the client.

The newest trends driven by consumers is about tapping into media that the consumer is voluntarily engaging with.  The key here is voluntarily.  This is why the online communities and social networks are so powerful.  The consumer is choosing to engage.   

From a marketing point of view, I can’t imagine a better audience.

Just wanted to introduce our new blogger Deepak Murthy – will update later with a photo,

He is an expert on developer communities having worked at companies like Sun Microsystems and Network Appliance. He has a MBA from UC Berkeley and a Masters in Computer Science from SUNY Buffalo. Overall one of the smartest guys I have known in my career and a very contagious sense of humor.

He posted What makes communities tick. Let us know what you think.

Mukund Mohan’s blogs at http://www.bestengagingcommunities.com/ offer an insight into the reasons that make an online community successful. Lets review some of them here.

1) An effective community manager. He is one who listens, responds well and facilitates discussions/participation among community members.

2) The growth of cross-organizational communities within a corporation.
This results in the sharing of ideas, thoughts, solutions and contributes to the benefit of the entire community.

3) Great questions asked by community members.
This is a key metric for measuring the success of a community and results in great discussions as well as increased participation.

4) The need for people to connect and feel connected.
This has resulted in an explosion of successful online communities.

5) The growth of the personal social index as an accepted measure of a person’s true indicator of
wealth. This is increasingly a measure of a participant’s self-esteem with his peers and takes into consideration factors such as
• which communities you are a part of
• how often do you blog
• do you say anything that’s useful

6) Branding of products using online communities by consumers.
This is a way for companies to increase brand loyalty and attract new customers.

Kari of Go Wholesale asks:

How do you get people to talk? Our trouble seems to be that despite our
open-ended posts to try and get discussions going, no one is participating. We
have member registrations galore, but no one wants to talk. Should we ask them
for feedback re: what they want to see?

Here is what we have seen things that work. Please try these and feel free to let us know what worked for you.

1. Make the connection first BEFORE you ask for participation. There are NO shortcuts unfortunately. For e.g. if you walked into a party and asked some open ended questions of people would you get responses? Probably not. What you have to do is to first INTRODUCE yourself, then find some easy lay up questions to get them comfortable. Dont hesitate to make an offline (email, phone) connection with your community also. This helps a lot to get them comfortable.

2. Target the frequenters first and make hero / examples of them to participate. For e.g. Once you make the connection, then post a question one of them asked to them, and their 2-3 peers. Once people start to see that a question from one of “them” is being asked by “one of them” versus the community manager, things get easier and more comfortable.

3. Ask the easy questions first then go to the questions that might get a lot of debate. Every person in the community likes the question – “Here’s what we are thinking, what would you advice?” OR “Here are 3 options to increase our pricing that we are considering, which do you think causes the least interruption?” Just open questions help when you made most of the participants comfortable enough that they consider it their community.

4. Offer examples that pertain to their lives instead of just trying to get information from them. E.g. If all your questions are about things your company or sponsor of the community wants to hear from the community, that quickly dilutes the dicussion. Most participants have a lot other things going on in their lives / work than just the community. Find out how to help them with  other issues related to that and you will get more participation.

5. Think really like the user. Make it their discussions, their forums, their community. I went to your site Kari and its catalog driven discussions based on “your” thinking of the type and category of questions that you think are important. But users firedog2ks  and arbutus are asking questions not related to your categories in the forum.
Setup the categories for your threads minimally first and then revisit frequently.