I met with Chris Heuer at our offices today to discuss ways to work with Chris and Howard Greenstein about Social Media Club.

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3 people asked me this during last week: Ami C of Deloitte, Jim S of Shared Insights and Elizabeth C of Yahoo.

“Are you going to blog about this?”

Now, normally I dont think much about it, but it really got me thinking.

I was asking them all the same question – “What is your view on the market for communities? Is this another cry wolf situation or is this for real this time?”

 There are a few folks like Barry of Shared Insights and Mike of Impact Interactions that have been in the community industry for over 10+ years, so I was trying to get a consolidated view of the market potential.

Back to our question: – Is there such as thing as “off the record”? What are your options knowing that someone is a blogger?

1. You can put up a front and really say the kosher thing. This works for some people some of the time, but those of us who have been interviewed several times know that this does not work all the time.

2. You can put it all out and really say what’s on your mind and leave the rest to consequences. The problem is of course the Internet has a LONG memory. E.g. Apparently Webex Diane D said a few things off the record to Nate that he posted on his blog. She took in all in stride apparently.

3. Make sure you really know the bloggers background and profile before engaging. Not the best approach but an option neverthless. Mention to them when something is off the record and when its okay.

So what would you do? If you know someone blogs frequently and often, what would you do when you are taking with them?

I interviewed Jane KnowItAll, the CEO of Communities-R-Us in June 2012. Here is an excerpt from our discussion.

Mukund Mohan: Jane, tell us more about what happened in the community market in the last 3-5 years?

Jane:
Yes it has been a wild ride for sure. In the last 5 years we have seen
an explosion in the number of online communities to the point where
there are more communities than there are people in the world. For
example my dog has an ID chip inserted in his leg, so she can connect
with other dogs (only dobermans) in their RFID community
to discuss how to bark in a more efficient way at Postmen or strangers.
But with humans, the community aspect got its hype in 2008 time-frame,
then faded for a few years, when everyone realized this was not all
that fun, so offline communities became the vogue again, but after 2009
when a lot of privacy and universal online id issues were resolved, communities became the new black.
Mukund: So what has driven the growth?

Jane: Primarily the need for people to connect and feel connected, and the growth of the Personal Social Index, which is widely accepted number replacing your Net Worth as the true indicator of your “wealth as a person”.

Mukund: Tell us more about the Personal Social Index? I have one, but is it like my FICO credit score?

Jane: Its another measure of your self esteem with your peers.
Basically we look at multiple factors such as a) which communities you
are a part of? b) how often do you blog? c) do you say something that
is useful? d) do you snore a lot when you are online? e)  which
communities rate you as an alpha? etc. Its a 49 point online community profile (we stole this from eHarmony and their bad ads). Then we compute it all together and pick a random number between 0 and 1000 and assign it to you.

Mukund: So if my number is 150 does that mean I am a loser?

Jane: Well, 0 to 100 means you are a moron, 100 -250 means you are a
loser, 250 – 500 indicates life but no brain and 500 – 700 means you
have a lot of link love and finally >700 means you know something or
have some pictures of someone that they dont want everyone else to know
about. But now we have potential employers looking at this number as
seriously as the background check, your credit report check before they
hire you.

Mukund: What does the future hold for online communities?

Jane: Who knows, we did not know this in 2007 for example when it
was a fun time and everyone walked around like it was the gold rush for
online communities. What we do know is it will be a lot more parties,
more community news and lot more fun.

Mukund: Thank you for wasting our time.

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?