Lee Lefever recently posted Online Community Lessons from SXSW and Community 2.0.  It’s a nice summary and well worth reading.  One piece jumped out at me in particular:

Your community already exists: Know that your customers are already a community. You have an opportunity to offer something to customers that other web sites can’t: access to the people and news that have the power to change the products and services they care about. Serve the community that exists and offer them access to things they cannot get elsewhere. This was partly a point from John Hagel’s keynote, well documented by Patty Seybold.

I really like the simplicity and the depth of this quote and wanted to explore my interpretation just a bit:

1)  Know that your customers are already a community. 

I liked this in particular because it acknowledges an often missed core principle of community development.  Take a look at the shear # of posts and discussions about "building an online community" (here are 3.7m hits on search.live.com).  The point here is that you are not building a community because your users don’t have one…they do.  In fact, I’d say by definition, a group of individuals who have purchased your product/service are a community.  They may have very loose ties to one another (and you), but they do share something in common - they use your stuff.  Your opportunity is to explore how deepening those ties between them AND with you creates a win/win situation.  Remember, they don’t need you to commune with fellow users - those communities already exist.

Test yourself here:  Does your company see 3rd party community sites about your products as "competitive" to your own community plans/desires?  If yes, why?  This is a warning sign you should explore more.  Imagine why those sites developed - someone was SO passionate about your products that they built a destination to gather and discuss with other users - they should be your best friends!  Yes, it’s independent content and may not always reflect positively on you - but that is the point…that’s part of why it is good - and be honest, not everything you do is a good idea.  Caveat: Some 3rd party communities morph into something more like journalism than users helping users.  This is a topic for a future post - these situations require additional consideration. 

2)  You have the opportunity to offer something to customers that other web sites can’t:  access to the people and news that have the power to change the products and services they care about.

This is where you have the opportunity to deliver on the win/win.  The formula here might be different based on your business/product/industry - or maybe not.  But you need to write down what you get from developing your community and what your users get - the old give/get framework - and if it looks out of balance - you have a problem.  If it benefits you too much - your users won’t stay.  If the balance is too much towards your users, you may not stay.   If you have a home run on your hands - you’ll see some of the same things written on each side of the balance sheet.

To me, the ultimate destination is to earn an emotional connection with your users (recommended reading:  Kathy Sierra).  Of course, this is much easier said than done, so I’ll apply my translation.  You have to participate.  You have to listen.  You have to embrace criticism.  You have to accept input.   And maybe most importantly, you have to be a PEER in the community.  Bottom line:  You have to demonstrate respect - when you’ve done this, you earn trust and the community grows.  This won’t come from a good speech or blog post, but is only earned by the actions you take in supporting your community.

How do you know when you’ve won their hearts?  They recommend you.  They stand up for you.  They offer solutions or suggestions with their criticisms.  You’re talking "with them" vs "at them." They are no longer "them."  In other words, you know their names, interests and specialties and they are learning yours.

In the end, it’s not really that complicated.  What you uniquely have to offer your users are relationships - bi-directional connections that listen, respond and make changes based on the conversations.  They bought your "stuff," so isn’t this the goal.  Yes, we are all afraid of the scale challenge - you can’t have a relationship with everyone - but there are ways to manage this once you’ve decided on your intent.

3)  Serve the community that exists and offer them access to things they cannot get elsewhere.

Remember, don’t look at those 3rd party communities as the enemy…look at them as part of the portfolio of options that exists for your users and decide what you can add to the portfolio?

• Specialized content
• Access to experts
• Escalation to formalized support
• Pre-release (beta) access
• Feedback systems connected to the decision makers
• Indemnification - this one is tricky - but some advice in some situations will require you stand up and assure your users of the advice they are getting.
• Aggregation:  Of all those 3rd parties we were talking about:)

Coming soon:  We need to talk more about "segmentation" of community users.  Much has been written on this, but I think it’s an important follow-on topic as it can help you with scale and may dictate how you structure your give/get framework as well as the add on services I described in #3 above.

Sean

Popularity: 7% [?]

Ever notice that Linked In is loaded with Recruiters??  That’s not the point of this post, but I think we can all agree that the recruiting function of HR has long since discovered communities as an avenue for adding talent to organizations.   But recruiting is only one small part of the HR function.  What about talent management and organizational design?

Wikinomics got me thinking more about this HR connection.  The obvious assertion in the book is that there will always be more smart people outside your company than inside your company.  It goes on to claim that volunteers will self-organize in more efficient ways than managers can accomplish inside hierarchical organizational structures.  I don’t know if I buy this, but the possibility that it is true should be enough to make your consider the implications.  I will buy that volunteers are frequently more motivated than paid professionals - there is a natural difference in motivation.  Think about your own volunteer efforts and test this.

So, how should HR think about this.  I’m not sure I know the answer, but it is high time to engage in the coversation.  I think you can safely say that talent management and organizational design are dramatically different in the Web 2.0 world and the traditional, largely internally focused (except recruiting), role of HR will be tested by this evolution.  Product and services insight gathering is certainly low hanging fruit already underway, but I think that is just the beginning.  External participation through co-production, co-development and user generated content are big opportunities.  That said, don’t get me wrong when I say "opportunities".  It isn’t long term market advantage for those companies that do this well, it’s market relevance, as this is the way business WILL be done in the future.  There will be benefits for fast and first movers and I think harsh penalties for those who don’t move.

I’d love your thoughts and examples on this!!  In the end, this may be one of the most core issues to how your company might think about communities and the impact of Web 2.0.

I wonder, can large, traditional organizations facilitate self-organizing principles?

Oh…and remember, if you liked this…"Digg it!!"

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Sean

Popularity: 13% [?]

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In the series I wrote on Convincing the unconverted, Part 3, I talked about using the data/evidence approach to convincing your business of the value of communities.  It often feels to me like many of the investments being made in communities by businesses are first and foremost about brand and brand marketing.  That is not inherently wrong, but I do feel it is too limited a purpose for communities and in fact if done in isolation to other motivations may be perceived as insincere by your users – (and, they might be right!).  I guess I tend the see marketing benefits as a good by-product of why you do communities, not the reason you do it.  I thought in this post I’d talk a little more about “insights.”  This can be broken down into a number of areas:

1.     Product feedback (both current and future) – Important:  Don’t assume you know everything you need to know from your call centers!!  That is a “going out of business feedback model.”

2.     Policy, program or content feedback

3.     Demographic insights – better understanding who uses your products

4.     Preference information – Why people use your products or why not

5.     Companion information – people who use your product also use _____?

6.     Competitive insights – whose products do they use instead of yours

7.     Unexpected insights – users often do what you didn’t intend with your products – this might indicate new markets or avenues of sales/development

8.     <insert your additions here>  

Now, realistically, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to do all of this – particularly in a short time frame.   Just collecting all these insights is non-trivial to say the least – it could be a massive amount of data (unstructured data)!  And taking action on it, which your users expect, is even more challenging.  Not all of it is actionable and you can’t be all things to everyone.  So deciding how to manage this is a complex, but important task. 

Perhaps, together we can share some thoughts on who we think is doing this particularly well and what we think about the approach is effective.

I’ll start with a couple of examples:

http://connect.microsoft.com/: Now, I’m not hiding that I work at Microsoft, but I don’t work on this project and either way, I still think this is very good.  The concept of connect is to provide an engagement, feedback and voting mechanism on Microsoft products.  On the splash screen, you can see connect has over 800,000 members who have registered over 225,000 bugs and over 30,000 product suggestions.  You can quickly view a list of connection opportunities, manage your participation and join others in publicly contributing and/or voting on others contributions.  Imagine, a public database of everything that is wrong with your products – this would be heresy for many companies.  But communities are all about transparency. 

http://www.dellideastorm.com/: This is pretty new, but is another interesting engine for gathering insights.  After registering, you get a quick idea of the size of the community and some light reputation based on top participants.  More importantly, you can quickly navigate user provided insights and either add to the insights or vote on existing.  As a company that brands itself on user customization, this is an interesting way to extend their customer research process.

http://suggestions.yahoo.com/:  Just so I’m not accused of any Microsoft biasJ  The level of activity here doesn’t seem very high yet (I think this is fairly new), but the idea is quite similar to those mentioned above.

As the collector of insights, knowing how to think about the thresholds for when you take actions and how you close the loop back will be an important part of your planning process…but the first step toward collection and transparency seems to have some obvious long term benefits.  A big challenge of feedback systems is that they can add so much noise to the system that you don’t know what to do.  That’s what I love about these examples with voting models implementing.  With nuturing, the community will manage the noise out by voting for what is good and marginalizing what isn’t most important. 

Imaging how your users will feel when they “see” their feedback in your product!!  This ain’t easy!!  But, that should be the core principle. 

Now, who do YOU think is doing this well!  (yes you, this means now you post a comment) 

Feeling informed? Digg it!

Sean 

Popularity: 16% [?]

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Convincing the unconverted, part 3

For technique #3 of “convincing the unconverted on communities,” I thought I’d talk a little about:  The Data/Evidence driven approach.

#3:  The Data/Evidence approach

Unfortunately this might be the toughest, but at the same time the one with highest likelihood to succeed within a corporation.  What data/evidence to use depends a lot on the following:  

• What industry you are in

• What organization you roll up to (Marketing? Product development? Support? Sales?)

• What communities you have today (is there any baseline data?)

The truth is, there is a community today for almost everything; it’s just that you might not host it.  That might constrain how easily you can collect data from it, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t very valuable to your users. 

Risk:  Don’t let measurement define your strategy…let your strategy define your measurement.  Sounds obvious, but too often it is not.

The following are some thoughts on Data and Evidence that help build the story for communities.  I’m not saying all this is easily measured or completely measurable at all, but these are some of the areas I’ve thought about.

1. Satisfaction and likelihood to recommend – Every company I know does something to measure these indicators (satisfaction being rear-view and recommend being forward looking).  How do your community users opinions differ from non-community users?

2. Product insights – Are you collecting product insight through the community conversations?  Can you compare that to other mechanisms?

3. Outreach – Are your communities extending your brand or helping you reach users (potential users) you never reached before?

4. Credibility – Mastercard model – the independent community voice compared to your “corporate voice” is “priceless”

5. Image/”humanization” – Your chance to demystify your company.  You can “put a face” on your company through bloggers and/or content that is just downright unexpected, and GREAT.  Example:  Check the ReadMe.txt on Channel 9: http://channel9.msdn.com/about.aspx.  My favorite is #8:)

6. Community “Health” – Unique users, return rate, average days active, answer rate, rss feeds, etc 

That’s a good start, I’m sure I’ve missed some good ideas I hope others will add.  I guess I would note that every metric is inherently limited and taken in isolation could really lead you down the wrong path…so check your assumptions regularly (ask your users!).

Next up:  “The Assumptive Close” – a personal favorite

Sean

Popularity: 6% [?]

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For the past year or two I’ve maintained a private "community site" exclusively for reaching a private community.  I’ve resisted moving to a purely public blog, but I’ve tired of the constraints of a private, by definition more limited, conversation.  Like most bloggers, I think I fear two things most about this:  1)  No one cares, and 2)  Failure to commit the time, energy and ideas to keeping it fresh.  So, with that opening, let me begin.

Let me start with the what put me over the edge to launch this blog.  I’ve worked on communities for the last few years for Microsoft.  Now, to be fair, there are MANY people who work on communities at Microsoft and in many different capacities (a community in and of itself).  As this blog evolves, I hope to not only increase the clarity of what my specific role is at Microsoft, but hopefully introduce you to others that can add to these conversations.  The short version of my work is as the global leader for the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional award program (www.microsoft.com/mvp).  Recently, this charter has grown to include how we should think about the intersection of communities and the support experience for Microsoft products.  Now, this blog is not an advertisement for that program or Microsoft.  I’m certain I will talk about these areas as the work there has greatly influenced and informed how I think about communities - so complete seperation is impossible.  That said, I want to be clear that this blog is not an official Microsoft page and represents no opinions but my own (and I suppose those of you that may post here).

One more note however that is fair - I did choose to use MSN Spaces as the host for this.  I did NOT choose MSN Spaces to demonstrate any particular loyalty to Microsoft (in fact my wife’s blog is on Blogger.)  But, since I do work at Microsoft, I thought "eating our own dogfood" would be informative, so I’m going for it.  This isn’t loyalty - it’s self evaluation and if I don’t like it…I’ll let you know. [IF YOU ARE READING THIS NOW, I HAVE ALREADY MOVED OFF OF MSN SPACES - BOTTOM LINE, SPACES IS GREAT, AMAZING IN FACT FOR FAST/LOW BARRIER TO ENTRY BLOGGING FOR THE MASSES.  THAT SAID, ALL THE EASE OF USE COSTS YOU SOME CUSTOMIZATION I WANTED - THUS, THE CHANGE]

So, back to why I’m starting this now (and why I chose Community "Group Therapy" as a moniker).  About a year ago I began a process of trying to find and connect with some of my peers in other corporations working on community.  That effort culminated in a gathering this week of Community leaders from 14 pretty well known companies.  I won’t "out them" here for sake of their privacy, but they may chose to do so on there own.  I will say the group included companies as diverse as consumer packaged goods, energy, media/entertainment, large retailers, transportation, and technology.  The point of this gathering (by design) was to gather individuals thinking about communities from across many different industries to really talk about the issues, challenges and passions for growing and contributing to communities.  I commented a few months ago to some colleagues, as we talked about doing this event, that I thought it might feel a lot like "group therapy."  Sort of a cleansing and debate on conflicts and challenges we deal with as faces of community within traditional corporate structures.  And indeed it was…

We debated some great topics:

• The value and importance of user to user discussion - The read only "web" is no longer sufficient - down right dead in my opinion
• The credibility and inspiration gathered from user generated content and insights
• The difficulty of balancing the speed and openness we believe in and the (sometimes understandable) constraints of legal policy
• Measurement and impact - let’s face facts, we do exist inside businesses, we have to articulate the value of the investment - this could spur some controversy of course - community is a pure, intentially non-corporate exercise, but let’s not hide from the reality of business accountability - I don’t believe that is in conflict with pure community.  This is a good future topic I will tuck away and think about.
• Community moderation - I was pleased/proud to hear the strong collective view that moderating out profanity/offensive content is a reasonable line, but uniform agreement that criticism is welcomed.  The point here being that communities must be places where honest dialog occurs - both positive AND negative, both supportive AND critical.  More on this in a later post too.

I probably learned as much about community in 1 day as I had learned in the last year or more combined.  So, that was the lightning rod to start this blog…with the hope that I could find a way to continue the conversation and broaden the participants in ways that advances the cause of the shift to "mass collaboration" (note: Read Wikinomics!).

Along with my first post, I’ve added some links to other sites I follow and some books I’m reading (or read recently) that I found to be worthwhile.  I welcome suggestions of ones I’m missing you think I might enjoy.

Now, let’s see if anyone reads this and I’d love your thoughts on the above topics.

Sean

Popularity: 4% [?]