One of the things I hear consistently from many organizations who
run a “dead”, “dull” or “did not work” community is “Yes we did that –
We have 3 wikis, 4 blogs, a discussion board, but we see no traction.
Unlike other companies our customers are different, communities wont
work”.

There are 3 primary reasons why it does not work in our experience and here’s what to do about it:
1. “Lets put it out there and see what happens”
approach: This is the most common. There is mostly a lack of commitment
to the community project and most of the time we see that this is done
by a director or manager who wants to “prove” to their executive that
“New is the new old” <img src="http://www.futureofcommunities.com/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif&quot; alt="” class=”wp-smiley”> . So they put a community bulletin board, tell couple of their co-workers and expect magic to happen within a quarter.
2. “Enamored with cool technology” approach: In this case, you will find they have at least 2 of everything – even for a company with just 20 people <img src="http://www.futureofcommunities.com/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif&quot; alt="” class=”wp-smiley”>
They do a filmloop of their product screen shots, convert their
customer presentation to 4 formats – Breeze, Flash, online Powerpoints
and put it on FlickR. We consistently find that companies with this
problem have a mostly technical owner for the community.
3.  “Build it and they will come”
approach: Marketing the community is for “the MBA types with suits”
according to these folks. They firmly believe that everything good has
to grow ONLY by word of mouth and in a viral fashion.
These points are not to say most companies dont “get it” when it comes
to communities. Here are 3 simple points to think about when you are in
a state such as this that has worked for us successfully. Try it and
let me know if it works for you:

1. For businesses ultimately there is a business process that
needs to be broken and fixed. Start with that business process which
you believe is inefficient and THEN figure out how to get the community
to help.

2. Focus on the community second – the “participants”, “members”
etc. The first few are critical and you need to deeply understand their
motivation and desire. Once you figure it out ensure you have a
campaign (does not have to be a super bowl ad) to get more of them
together.
3. Understand the best “uses” of the technology versus the features it
offers third. As opposed to just putting a wiki and hoping people start
to write something, why not have people help put your upgrade
documentation or install guide via a wiki while the engineers, QA folks
and release engineers work on it together?

What do you think?

In a show of hands at the start of the conference, Francois asked
the audience how many people had communities already and how many were
starting one. The result was – 50% – split down the middle. Interesting.

Throughout the sessions I heard several folks looking for answers
from the speakers and the experts. Since I had several discussions
around this topic, I thought I would share our ten point check list – I
am not saying this is meant to be comprehensive – just what’s worked
for us over the years.

1. Figure out what you want to give to your participants.
The NEXT question is what you or your company wants from the community.
The order is very important as John Hagel mentioned in his morning
session about participant centric communities.
2. Understand why you want to have a community.
Is it for promoting your point of view (not a great reason for
participants to get passionate about), OR is it to give them a voice?
Or like Intuit its to help them share among each other?
3. Formulate a core team.
Our average internal team size has been 3.2 (no more .2 jokes I
promise). Preferably a cross functional team of marketing, product and
customer evanglists.
4. Do a quick survey of your customers. Understand
what they want out of it. E.g. Sean from Fidelity was mentioning to me
that they realize their customers dont get “passionate” about 401K –
but their community is all about ANSWERING questions their members
have. On the opposite end, Jake mentioned LEGO customers wanted to give
their input into what they love about the product.
5. Put a good marketing plan for
HOW you plan to make your community AWARE that you are around. It
should include simple promotion materials, the benefits of joining,
what they will get out of it, etc.

6. Identify your influencers – the first few that
will really help you get started and get religion. How are you going to
help them get others to get religion?
7. Learn about the technology: 
You dont need to know HOW it works, but more HOW IT CAN APPLY to help
your participants. Learning the basics about RSS, Wikis, blogs, etc.
does help but we will share in another post how to

8. Clearly identify your resource plan: Who is
spending time to answer questions, who will help with customer
engagement, who is going to moderate or who is going to help market to
customers.
9. Put together a simple BUSINESS Justification: 
You are probably going to have to sell it to management. Use simple NOT
complicate Net Present Value metrics for tangible ROI. Use customer
engagement metrics such as number of people who will sign up. etc.
10. Get it going. Its okay just start and see how you can figure it out. Most good communities started small and grew.

Again, this is not a “just add water” recipe, but a list of items that we follow. Feedback welcome.

I had a very thought provoking conversation with Nate Ritter on Open Source, Mashups and unconferences. I also met with Kaliya about Open ID and her facilitation of some really great un-conferences.

Here are some thoughts I gathered from our conversation:

1. Communities have helped several 20-something developers gain valuable experience BEFORE they get their first job. Contributing to open source communities helps these younger folks gain that knowledge on how to participate with a team, teaches them “politics” in the workplace and how to deliver an on time project.

2. IBM David Churbuck mentioned that they identified their top community 1% by reviewing who blogged, who moderated some of their independent groups, etc. He said he HIRED a new employee from that group of independent “free” moderators. This is great motivation of participants and user moderators in communities.

3. Lynne of Chicago Tribune mentioned that their users felt a greater sense of connection with key executives to help SHAPE the future of the reporting at the newspaper. Who else can talk about MAKING a CHANGE or a DIFFERENCE in a large scale? This is an opportunity for several individuals to contribute and make a difference.

These are the things you can position to the community members as the VALUE of participation besides connecting with one another.

Gina Bianchini is the CEO of Ning. She also blogs about Social Networking, Ning and the journey of building a company. Ning is a 2 1/2 year old company, and they have created a platform for building social networks. “You choose a combination of features (videos, blogs, photos, forums, etc.) from an ever growing list of options, you choose how it looks, you decide if it is public or private, you add your brand if you have one, and you enable the people on your network to create their own custom personal profile pages all in one social network.”

She was at SWSX with her crew and I spoke to her from San Jose (before my own flight to Community 2.0 at Las Vegas).

The work social networks obviously means many things, so I am going to refrain from making specific definitions of what it is and rather focus on what it can do for your company.

The question we were discussing was around “How can companies embrace the power of social networks and the power that it can bring?” I was specifically interested in the social networks that Ning powers and wanted to understand the examples of specific networks that they have benefitted from.

Ning just released their new version of Ning (Feb 2007) and since they have seen 14,000 new social networks added to their existing 30,000 social networks.

Here are the top 3 takeaways from the interview that you can leverage as a company looking to either “stick your toe in the social network” or “drink out of a fire hose”.

1. The power of the two way dialog with customers and users: They dont teach you this in Business School (She should know since, she went to Stanford) but there is immense power in leveraging the knowledge and experiences of your users and customers. Intuit does a good job of this, but the idea that your company builds a product and “tests” it but not in “real world conditions” is now no longer an excuse for products that have good design but poor usability. Users and customers can tell you really how your product or service works in their environment and under their conditions.

2. Reducing feedback time on newly released products: Since they launched their product in 2 weeks Ning has feedback from users directly on what is good and what needs to be fixed. She personally spends a good amount of time (4+ hours daily – which is amazing) on listening to user feedback and working with them on ensuring their issues get heard and fixed. We know from another consumer products company that they reduced the time to get packaging issues resolved on their new product by 3 months using online communities.

3. Getting your product messaging and positioning right: We obviously spend a lot of time, energy and effort on building the right message and position for our products, but who better than your customers to tell you what’s working and what’s not. Leveraging the power of user message testing I know that a software company changed its target audience to price the product higher.

Skitzzo at SEO Refugee has a post on 10 mistakes that will kill your forum:

Summary from SKitzzo

1. Excessive Ads

2. Cliques

3. Trolls

4. Fights

5. Heavy Handed Moderating

6. Lack of Moderation

7. Over Posting

8. Violating Privacy

9. Slow Site

10. Over promising and under delivering

I had a facinating discussion with 2 propects and Aaron Zizter about communities and “business processes”. Many of the conversations I have with businesses (mostly large to mid sized) is around HOW they want to build & grow their community. The important item to realize is that business process (and the automation of them) are the key for most corporations.

The reason is simple – it lets you “scale” and “repeat” the complex or simple tasks and makes for a more productive workforce.

So if you focus on the business processes that need to be fixed then it creates one (of many) starting point for you to then get the right users (community members) and finally the use of several applications and technology (wikis, blogs, etc.) you have the starting need for a community and what is goal might be. True?

Why is it that when it comes to communities many believe that some of these truisms dont hold true?

Here are some of my explanations:

1. Its too simple an approach. Given that there are over 1000+ consultants for SEO alone, and over 2500 buzz words around PPC, CPM, BLAH, etc. why should everything old still be valid?

2. Communities put the people first and everything else later. Granted they still have to do something together for the greater good, but if your center of gravity is the community member, then the nodal questions change.

Do you find yourself asking these questions?
What do users want to do in a community? When do users use the community? What can we do for users to leverage the community more?

As opposed to:
What can we do to improve our invoicing with our partners by leveraging communities?  When is the best time to release our product so that it causes minimal disruption to our users?

3. Business processes are boring. Lets face it. Not many people really want to do repetitive work and handle only by exception. Its little value-add and lot more bottom line focused. But communities are fun, time wasting to a certain extent (gasp).

Do you agree? Why do you think people forget the basics or throw it out of the door when they want to start building communities?

From Information week:
“At Procter & Gamble, the Enterprise 2.0 push is all about speed.
“Enabling effective collaboration is like adding a sixth gear to a race
car,” says CIO Filippo Passerini. The 140,000-employee company is
rolling out Microsoft SharePoint and Office Communicator as well as
Microsoft Windows Desktop Search company-wide, while adopting blogs and videoconferencing in critical niche roles, including a blog
to answer questions about the SharePoint rollout. P&G’s goal is to
make it easier for employees to connect to each other and to outsiders,
and the effort will be measured based on whether it helps get smart new
products to shelves faster. “In a world where competition gets tougher
every day, minutes really do count,” Passerini says.”

Review the opinions of Nic on the adoption of Enterprise 2.0. And also on his theory of adoption.

Good read.

Marc Canter is a legend by most people’s standards. He has contributed so much to the industry that few people dont know him or his work. He founded MacroMind – which later became MacroMedia. He is also credited with the first virus distributed in commercial software. He currently CEO of Broadband Mechanics, a 25+ person social network software and solution company with primary offices in Walnut Creek California.

Marc’s current company provides software, source code download, software as a service, hosted service and any possible other type of solution for creating social communities. Its not very expensive to get up and running since a couple of his enterprise customers have told him “You ought to charge us more for this”. Its starts at $2500 (perpetual license) to a MAX of $40,000 – nothing more to pay ever and YOU GET the source code.

Its important to provide options – and in Marc’s case for Broadband Mechanics, it makes a lot of sense. In case when you are expected to fulfill every option offered as if it were the only option – ensure you staff appropriately for it.

<img src="/images/64360-56413/rachel_ray2.jpg”>

Chris Carfi blogs at Social Customer Manifesto, which is another good resource of insight into communities and enterprise adoption. He has a very interesting link:

“Enterprise Web 2.0 Efforts: How To Get To Critical

Here is something that caught my eye:
“As such, growing an online community takes time and dedication; there’s no “just add water” silver bullet.”

I would agree in principle, but I cannot help but think before Rachel Ray came along there were hundreds of well intentioned cooks who suggested “Making everything from scratch” – How quaint?

Lets assume you have the dedication, but What if you dont have the time? Does that mean there’s no hope?

Here are some of the just add water tips that we have used to get a community up and running quicker.

1. Speed Dating: Making offline introductions to participants by “pre screening” interests of users so they can have a smaller clique to start with and feel part of the community quicker.

2. Its okay at times to bet on the one thing and have only one backup: For an internal community of sales reps whose eyes glazed everytime we said “Sales training” we completely advocated removal of a central event and replaced it with “all eggs in one basket” Breeze based 5 minute update sessions. Worked like a charm. Realize that some of these will work, some wont, but its worth a try.

3. Offer incentives (not things like money, or starbucks cards, etc.) that truly meet the underlying needs of the community. E.g. Appeal to their “leaving a legacy” like UOP or “no more boring 3 hour PowerPoints” for sales personnel.

What do you think? Where can you find that Rachel Ray in your company to help making good quality but without the start from scratch?