Michael’s parents are both deaf, but their lives changed with the advent of
Internet communities by allowing them to communicate and interact in a way
unimaginable before, which was the seed of inspiration for Michael. They have
the vision of allowing companies, customers break down the barriers to
communicate with each other and enrich lives.

He clearly sees the market for online communities moving away from the early
adopters to the early majority, driven by “The Myspace
effect”, which we have written
about before. Companies large and small having seen the sheer numbers and
size of Myspace and the cult-like following are actively looking at their own
constituents to see how they can foster discussions and conversations to their
benefit.

Here are the top 3 best practices he is recommending on the path to success
with social communities:

1. Align all user incentives (loyalty plan) towards goals for the community.
He advocates writing down clear objectives for the community e.g.:

a) # of
page views you wish to see annually / monthly / weekly – this assumes you care
about page views – which in a lot of cases translates to CPM (based on an ad
driven model)

 
b) # of
users you want to join as active participants in the community.

c) User facilitated interactions. There was a good piece on “Conversation
Index” by Don Dodge, which discusses this in more detail. How to track
that you are having a conversation with customers instead of talking at them?

2. Dedicate
resources and align their incentives towards the community goals. E.g. If
my bread is buttered (as a Marketing person) on number of leads generated, and
the community “project” is a night job, the misalignment is obvious.
Instead, ensure that the marketing person gets bonus paid on achieving the
community goals.

3. Measure the metrics that matter. Most social networks measure
tangible metrics, but not those that actually contribute to the growth of the
community or its vibrancy. If you have support community, maybe the metric that matters is more how quickly can users get the
information you need, instead of page views, which might tell you something,
but nothing useful or actionable.

There was an extremely compelling discussion I had with him on the Communities
being “Community Centric” vs. “User centric” – which is
about building a community for the sake of building it, versus driving the
community to build it. More on that later.

I published this in the Future of Communities a week ago.

It is absolutely facinating that some metrics can capture the
imagination of the masses very quickly. Some examples include the
airline industry (which I am told before the advent of SouthWest) did not care about cost per passenger
mile until this new metric has become a key determinant of
profitability. Similarly the Hotel industy used to care more about
Occupancy Rate until a few years ago, when RevPar became a more important number.

The question that I have been asking several experts in the community area is:
At the macro level what impact will communities and social networks have in economic terms?

I have heard several responses which I am trying to summarize below,
but to be honest I have not done a detailed assessment enough to claim
what I am sharing below is comprehensively thought out.

1.  Employee Productivity:
This is a number that a few Wall Street analysts have been tracking for
a few years. In simple terms take the total revenue, divide it by
number of employees. Since internal communities (collaboration
networks) will allow for employees to tap into the large knowledge,
contacts and networks of all the employees of the organization, we
should see a vastly improved employee productivity rate for companies
that adopt communities faster than those that dont.

2. Transaction Friction Loss:
Several prominent thinkers and experts have talked about reducing the
friction “tax” that is paid due to inefficiency of information
availability. In simple terms, I know something about X, but its
useless to me for most parts. Someone else is looking for information
about X but she knows how to monetize it. How do we connect her with me
at the quickest time to monetization? Google, as an example has reduced
the friction from lack of information (to a certain extent). Its not an
easy metric to track or come up with, but this metric should reduce
since networks will reduce the time, effort and money required to
connect each other.

3. Degree of Seperation. Degree, Network and Betweeness Centrality.“Social
network analysis [SNA] is the mapping and measuring of relationships
and flows between people, groups, organizations, animals, computers or
other information/knowledge processing entities. The nodes in the
network are the people and groups while the links show relationships or
flows between the nodes. SNA provides both a visual and a mathematical
analysis of human relationships. Management consultants use this
methodology with their business clients and call it Organizational
Network Analysis [ONA].”

Measuring how connected people are should reduce the degree of
seperation with communities from 6 to less than 4 is what many people
are expecting. The next question is:

“What is the value of reducing our degree of seperation?”

What do you think?

Tom Coates has a great presentation on Social Communities and Networks. Its a great overview of consumer communites (public) and user’s motivations, expectations and some good tips.

Came to me via John Wilson

Community Next was a gathering of several like minded folks about online communities (mostly consumer communities). Rohit Bhargava has a good post on the 10 secrets …

Some are very valid for business communities: Here are the best I thought:
1. Listen to your users
2. Get smart on recruiting (members)
3. Don’t lose the fun
4. Keep it real

I have to admit I am not the expert at a lot of things related to communities. Being someone that ran 2 before makes me a practitioner who has made many mistakes, but not all the mistakes one could make. Talking to a lot of other folks running much larger communities than the ones I did gives a very different perspective and set of new learnings.

The one takeaway:Its good to follow some best practices, but dont hesitate to try that important 3-5 new things each week / month / year so you can write your own best practices.

There have been several discussion I have had in the last few days regarding Internal communities. Most recently I was involved in a discussion with 3 folks: One person works for a very large software provider and is in the process of trying to build an internal sales community of over 1000+ people. Another person was responsible for a marketing community (collaboration) for over 50 support personnel. The third was trying to put together a collaboration intranet (not a regular intranet) of all their employees for technical document sharing and discussion.

Regardless of size they all had two questions that were consistent across the board:
1. How do we manage data growth (document, messages, asset) to ensure that we dont have to filter through a lot of useless, outdated information before we get to the right content?
2. How do we ensure automated excerption of comments and messages so we dont have to read a lot of useless information before we get to the 3 sentences that matter?

Most people cannot read a post like this with so many comments, that its hard to understand the top 3 points for and against.

I am going to tackle the first question now and cover the other question later.

At my previous company our internal collaboration content management system was a black hole. Everyone would say “you will find it on the discussion board” as the answer to every question, but the person searching would end up:

1. Getting 3 versions of the same post each dated differently but with slight variations. E.g: A thread which tells the release date changed 3 times on 3 dates, but the last updated date would be wrong.

2. Get too many posts but still not the right information. There would be 10 replies to a question but 90% or worse all would not still answer the question at all.

3. Multiple different discussions from different authors with conflicting data – the engineering VP would put the release date as 3/15, the release manager would have another document with the date as 4/15 and the product manager would have a third date, 3/30.

1. Encourage user tagging: Without making it extremely onerous, the best way to stop data growth and conflict is at the source. Tagging is a great means to ensure that similar documents are clustered appropriately. Ensure that content publishers can put the right content upfront and tag it appropriately.

2. Setup an active purging and archiving policy. There will be multiple discussion threads and comments, and multiple statistics have proven that there is a 80% to 20% noise to signal ratio on all message boards. An active policy ensures that it is granular by type of board, time elapsed and audience type of the participants.

3. Engage first then facilitate, finally moderate: Get internal users to participate. The best killer for any community is lack of participation. Then get the party going by encouraging (positive reinforcement of good valuable content, finally moderate unnecessary (or repeated) comments. No point in having 100 people having the same answer to the question or replying “RTFM”.

What are best practices that work for you? Let us know.

<img src="/images/64360-56413/speakingc20.gif”>

Community 2.0 Conference is being put together by Shared Insight and the Conference chair is Francois Gossieaux. It has an exciting line up of speakers and promises to be a fun event. Highly recommend it if you have the inclination to hear from the experts on how to manage and get successful with communities.

From the BBC:
Digital neighbourhood watch plan

Talk about communities that are LARGE. There is a proposal for a 911 type community driven nationwide network of websites.

“The idea of a nationwide network of 911.gov websites has
been proposed by Maryland university lecturers Ben Shneiderman and
Jennifer Preece in this month’s edition of Science magazine.”

The two academics admitted there were many hurdles to overcome but said the grids could be set up within three to five years.

“You must get people engaged in advance, to try it and learn it and be part of it.”

<img src="/images/64360-56413/Mike_Walsh.JPG” height=”166″ width=”149″>
We had a great discussion with Mike Walsh, CEO of Leverage Software. Having reviewed Leverage software’s technology and successful implementation at InfoWorld where they have over 10,000 users, we wanted to understand more the vision and direction of communities from him.

The Key Takeaway: The ROI from having customers connect with each other can be measured by reduced time to prospect conversion, reduced time & cost of conducting sales references and alignment to new purchasing behavior.

The great reinforcement that people tend to value referrals and recommendations now more than interrupt based marketing was clear to me from our discussion. Mike and Leverage software’s vision for having customers talk to customers (many to many) instead of one to many discussions between companies and customers (via portals) is a very compelling one that allows organizations to tap into the power of many.

Here are the top 3 best practices that Mike recommends based on their experiences with over 113 communities:

1. Dedicate an owner for the community initiative to ensure it gets a desired focus and delivers results. In most organizations this is 3 people’s night job and they want to do a great job, but dont have the tools, time and experience to get it done right.

2. Ensure that you set clear goals and objectives: E.g: InfoWorld (one of Leverage Software customers) had a goal to increase Page views since that targeted customer page views for them results in higher CPM from their advertisers. Another e.g. is Salesforce.com had a conversion ratio goal from prospects to customers in a specified time period as their objective, which motivated them to setup an invitation community of their customers and prospects.

3. Surround yourself with community experts instead of trying to do it all alone, which may result in a sense of being overwhelmed
and also to make sure you dont make the rookie mistakes. Francois also suggested this in his piece on BMC best practices, since they mentioned to get it going too way too long.

Very interesting questions come up when we talk to Marketing organizations about putting together user and customer communities. In full 60%+ of the organizations we talk with the “community” is usually started either by Support team or the Developer team – since they are in the high tech vertical and the value proposition is to reduce costs from supporting and managing a growing customer base.

In the last few quarters Marketing teams have increasingly started to look at their communities and trying to learn and figure out how to message, share and position their company, new products and news with their “communities”.

It becomes obvious very quickly for “traditional” marketing executives and professionals that the community “does have a mind of its own”, its own culture and its own perception of news, quality and brand.

So the dominating question for marketing organizations with communities becomes – “HOW can I control the brand, message and perception of my company & our products with the community?”

Francois at the Emergence Marketing blog has written very eloquently about this topic with his case study of BMC. Of course, Alan Moore has a very strong opinion on this too.

Fundamentally if you are a marketing professional, here are items to consider and answer for your self and some solutions for engaging thriving communities.

1. Engagement vs. Moderation: Is your brand passive (staid, corporate, serious – which is the norm for many industries) or is it more active (fun, easy)? An example would be New York life (serious brand) vs. Aflac (fun brand). Based on the demographic, although they are in the same industry, their customers and users are different and the perceptions are different. In our experiences for both passive and active brands, community moderation is nice, but community engagement is more critical.

E.g: In a recent community board, a customer shared some information about a product that failed during their tests of daylight savings time and actually made fun of it. The reaction from the company was to remove that posting.

Our suggestion was to instead admit the mistake, make fun of it in a nice way (as people now call it the John Stewart-ization of mistakes) and provide the fix for the problem.

2. Control vs. Facilitation: Marketing professionals have to realize that they cannot control 100% of the message and brand perception any more. Rather than control we recommend you facilitate customers by incentives (not monetary) to align to the perception you wish to see in the community and reflective of your corporate goal.

E.g: At a large developer community, the new product (still to be launched) had a lot of buzz among developers, but there were several customers already comparing it to other existing products and calling it a me-too product. The company response was to state via a “moderator” that since the product was not yet released, any discussion or speculation was useless and hence not worth discussing.

Our recommended approach was to have the product manager have a private webinar with some of the key community members to provide an “early preview” and collect competitive intelligence and have the members of the community start to discuss the known aspects of the product with the forum.

3. Co-opting vs. Competing: Customers have often come up with the best positioning for some of the products in companies that I have worked at. Almost always they express it in simple, elegant terms compared to a marketing person who desires to get the most “spin”. This is not to say marketing professionals are always “spinning” or that there is not value in it. Some marketing people I have worked with almost always will not accept the “layman’s description” of the product, since they believe they have to sell the bigger vision and value so they can charge a premium – this sometimes puts them in odds with the customer’s true usage or unintended uses of the product, which creates a competitive dynamic. Why not co-opt instead the unintended use and market to it so you can get best value?

E.g: At a community forum, a certain member asked other participants for some experiences associated with a tangential use of a embedded software product for one of their other business units. The immediate next step was a call from the inside sales person that the customer was NOT licensed to use the product for that business unit.

Our suggestion was to instead engage the customer in trying to understand what they wanted to use it for and how could the company help, then figure out how to possibly up sell their products to the new business unit.