Over the last several weeks, average daily page views to this blog have increased about 30%…along with it, a number of new subscribers to my RSS Feed.  So, to my new readers…WELCOME and thanks for checking out this site.  I sincerely hope you find valuable things here to read.  For those who have stuck with me the last few months since I launched, a hearty thank you to you as well.  There’s no compliment like a bit of readership:)

As this site has grown, I’ve come to the conclusion it will soon need a re-design with a focus on findability of the "best" content.  But, that is still work for another day.  Given the arrival of more recent readers, I decided to post here a quick guide to the most frequently read content from the first ~120 days of this blog…as well as a few calls to action.

Quick links:

Why this blog started in the first place:  A Logical Beginning.

Convincing the unconverted on Communities:  The 5 part (to date) series!

Part 1: The Analogy

Part 2: Fear by Example

Part 3: The Data/Evidence Approach

Part 4: The Assumptive Close

Part 5: Is your baby ugly?

Business Case for Community topics:

• Where for Art Thou Community ROI
• Your Community Already Exists
• Online Discussions:  Insights you can use!
• Enhancing Online and Community Support Models: Speech abstract

Community Management topics:

• Community Segmentation model
• The Trouble with Trolls
• Does your company support Employee Blogging?
• A little Discussion on corporate transparency
• Time to Consider the Pareto Principle

Technology:

• Are you "Tag Drafting"
• Visualization of Tag Drafting

Podcasts on communities I’ve done:

#1:  Mobile Tech in TAFE

#2:  Buzz Marketing for Technology

#3:  Solshare interview

Calls to action:

• Grab my RSS feed if you enjoyed reading anything here.
• Are you Twittering??  Get with it and add me here.
• Facebook?  Add me here.
• Delicious?  "Draft" me here.
• Check out my day job here. 
• Add me in Linkedin here.
• REALLY like this page?  Favorite me in Technorati  (shameless promotion…)
• And Finally:  If you find things here you like and you blog…have you linked to me?  Thanks!!

Sean

Popularity: 9% [?]

I last reviewed Made to Stick…still my #1 recommended read for the year…but I’m reading two other books now I will need to comment on soon, I thought I’d mention them today.

1) Ambient Findability:  What we find changes who we become (Peter Morville)

Not quite done with this, but a very interesting book by one of the luminaries on information architecture.  It’s both on the edge of my areas of interest and right in the center…the content isn’t the problem, it’s whether it will ever be found.

2) Citizen Marketers:  When People Are the Message (Ben McConnell / Jackie Huba)

I’m just getting rolling in this one, but from page one I can tell it’s right up my alley.  I’m particularly excited about this one as a mutual contact introduced me to the authors who I will meet face to face later this month.  Can’t wait!!

What are you reading??

sean

Popularity: 4% [?]

Seattle’s famous Fremont Troll

One of the challenges every community will eventually face…if not continuously face… is the disruption of "trolls."  Trolls are a particularly disruptive force in online communities.  You could probably create some categories for types of trolls in online communities (those with a grudge against you, those with a grudge against a group of other community members, those with a grudge against everything, those who are just plain obnoxious, etc).  Thinking through the categories could be fun and I might think on that more for another day.

Communities that don’t force authentication offer uniquely harder challenges with trolls as pure anonymity and difficulty of consequences (banning) embolden some of the worst behaviors.  Given the option, a community without some sort of registration and authentication (at least in order to post/comment) is not the best practice.

In general, trolls will hi-jack conversations with off topic and often outrageous claims on controversial topics.  In the end, the single best tactic for managing trolls (and hardest to do it seems) is ignoring them.  Keep in mind the following principles:

• The Troll’s goal is to draw you into debate and argument - a single response from you is victory for the troll.
• A troll is a troll is a troll is a troll is a troll - you do not have the power to bring them from the dark to the light.
• If you must, type out your response to the troll, save it for 24 hours, and then delete it - that process of writing was your opportunity for therapy!  Posting it will not help.

So…some do’s:

• Ignore, ignore, ignore (to a point)
• Moderation is important, especially to new forming communities (we have not always done this - and still don’t in many cases)
• Moderators who have credibility/status in the community are critical (no "drive by moderation"
• Post guidelines for your community and be consistent about them
• Consider providing tools to your top contributors to handle some poster problems
• Use authentication and no anonymous posting
• Consider providing a "wild west" forum - a place where off-topic and random is ok. 
• Do NOT get confused or drawn into a "freedom of speech" debate - make no mistake, if your community is hosted on your servers, that is your property, you can be held liable for what happens there - freedom of speech is a brilliant principal, but does not apply here.

What had me thinking about this is that we recently had some issues in some private communities with some of these kinds of problems.  It was in a private/"walled garden" community and while I’m not a moderator, I am a pretty well known participant in the space - I guess it helps to mention that I run the program that ultimately entitles the members to be in that community.  Now, I’m pretty pro "letting things go" in this scenario, but there comes a point where lines are crossed and a stand has to be made.

I consider part of the purpose of this blog to share practices (they may not always be the best practices…but they are examples from my experience).  In this case, I had hit the wall and writing and deleting my post was not the right response (given it was a private community).  So, for sake of sharing, here was my very personal post to the community.  I have only made minor <edits> to preserve some people and program privacy.

Thinking out loud - NOT making a policy decision.  I chose this part of the
thread as I like what <name removed> says here.

I’m not inclined to create more private NGs - don’t think it will help
really.
I don’t want to moderate - seems a horrible waste of resources to me
I can’t ban users from the private NGs the way they are configured - you are
either a <member> and have access or you are not a <member> and don’t have access.

I like the notion of values/principles.  As a leader and as a person, I have
to ask myself every day if I am living my values - what do I value?
#1  My family (this is both my home and my work family)
#2  Integrity/honesty/respect
#3  Accomplishment - I like getting things done

These aren’t all my values, but they are core to me and they have to apply
in both my work and my personal life.  If I don’t feel like I’m living them,
then I am failing - not someone else, but failing myself.  So, I work hard
to live these values in everything I do and I feel pretty good that I do it.
However, that said, when I look at the kinds of conversations that seem to
occur at times in the <name of specific community>, that is where I do feel like my values are out of sync with what is happening around something that is part of my work and "family".  I don’t think I can continue to allow these values to be out of sync.  I don’t know what to do about it and I’m quite certain not everyone will like any decision I make, but having everyone "like" my decisions is not on my list of values.

What would I like?  Everyone treated by default with dignity and respect.
If you can’t do that…don’t be here.   If you can’t resist, then I guess
ultimately you’d be making the decision mine - and that decision is not
likely to be one that treats a person differently, but one that says that
person is perhaps not aligned with the values of this <program> as embodied by the current leader of the program.

sean

This is probably one of the strongest and certainly most personal posts I’ve made in my history with community - reminder here - when I post in that community it is as an official representative of my company (and myself).  On the whole, I think this response was very necessary and overall very well and respectfully received.  It was a turning point as well for some recent troubles.  Whether the turn lasts or not is to be seen, but either way I have stated where I stand and communicated that action would be taken.

This aside, it’s an exceptionally important reminder that I am a very present, visible and credible (at least I think so:)) individual in this community.  If I was just another corporate representative who suddenly took a stand I would have been chased off and thoroughly dismissed.  I have authority in this community not because of my role, title, employer or responsibilities - but because of my consistent, open and honest presence there.  Turns out online respect is earned just like offline respect.

So, I hope this example is of some use.  Good luck with your communities and don’t forget to share your stories.  I suppose if there is one take away here, it’s that no matter the situation you need to address in your community, you must be a credible and respected presence there…so go engage!

Sean

Popularity: 9% [?]

I had a great time yesterday "peering" with a lot of super passionate people focused on online communities at the Forum One Unconference.  This was my first unconference and I really liked the semi-structured approach of open space events.  Not familiar with unconferences, check out this site.

There were lots of good sessions, but as usual the best take-aways were meeting people doing what I do from lots of other companies.  I got to lead a spirited session on Engaging Influencers through Recognition programs.  It was great fun to talk about some of what we are doing and talk with so many others interested in creating their own programs focused on community leaders.  This session included a great conversation in particular about the benefits and challenges of reputation management systems.  I owe a post on my overall views on this topic soon…so stay tuned.  ROI was another very spirited session…and I guess a hot topic based on traffic here to my recent blog post on ROI.

The session we didn’t have, that I will host next time, is to gather those of us doing this work at large scale.  It was great to meet people from Cisco, Amazon, Ebay, Yahoo, Disney and Intuit - I think we could have really benefited from grabbing a room and wallowing - this is a must do for next time.

That’s it for today!

Sean

Popularity: 19% [?]

On memorial day I hosted a BBQ at my house (nothing new - it was my 2nd BBQ party that weekend).  My neighbors (J & S I’ll call them) were over and all the kids were at play.  The 4 of us sat on the deck, wine in hand and visiting as usual.  "J" works for HP and "S" recently became the managing director of a very cool non-profit called Explorations in Math here in Seattle.  There is no question that I’m a web2.0 addict, but that said, it rarely is part of my daily dialog with family, friends, neighbors, etc.  There are plenty of other important and or entertaining topics to discuss at any given dinner party.

Both my wife and I are regular bloggers, so "S" asked us how our blogging was going.  She doesn’t read blogs and was curious what we blog about.  Her impression of blogging was people just talking about their daily lives and that frankly she couldn’t be less interested in reading random people’s daily update blogs or taking the time to author her own.  In fairness, it seems to me this is the majority of blogs…99.9% of which I find completely worthy of ignoring.

At this moment I asked them if they had heard of Twitter.  I think I was reveling in the fact that if they felt this way about Blogs, they’d really think Twitter was non-sense.  Describing Twitter, "S" reacted as expected - this is even less interesting.  To my surprise, "J’s" interest perked up.  He made the quick leap, which I liked, to the fact that there are a lot of people he’d be interesting in keeping tabs on, but really doesn’t want to talk to on the phone very often.   Our wives (probably very accurately) both thought this was very male of us.  It astounds my wife that I can have 1-2 conversations a year with some friends and that is enough and totally normal, whereas she talks with some of her friends nearly every day (a fact that I’m equally astounded by)!!

This lead to an discussion about MySpace.  My wife told the story of another group of friends who have recently come to parental battle with their 13 year old daughter who has a MySpace page.  The classic parent story - you CAN’T have one, she figured out how to do it anyway…they found out…explosion occurs.  This scenario has played out as long as there have been parents and kids.

Date:  54 BC

Og’s mother:  "Og, you will NOT hunt wooly mammoths until you are at least 14!!"

Og’s father (a few hours later):  "Hey, where’s my good spear?  Where is Og?"

"S" reflected on her solidarity with our friends stance on the MySpace page for their 13 year old.  I then told them about a speech I recently gave to a group of 40+ year old business leaders where I asked the following questions:

• How many of you have a MySpace page? (maybe 3 of 40+ hands went up)
• How many of you have kids with a MySpace page?  (maybe 12-15 hands went up)
• How many of the rest of you really don’t know if your kids have a MySpace page? (nervous chuckles and lots of hands)

There is no question that social networking offers some serious dangers for children.  (I tagged some online resources here).  You are never as anonymous as you think you are.  Check your online photos:  Do they include photos of your children?  Does your house # and or street appear in the background of a photo?  Even those of us who are inherently cautious are likely not cautious enough.

It’s a serious issue, but you won’t stop your kids from utilizing social networking online - and in fact, you’d likely be doing them a disservice long term to not enable them to be a part of this important new medium.  But, you need to do so like most things, by clearly helping your children understand your concerns, what the risks are and how to do so safely.  Oversight is definitely important, but don’t push their online actions into the underground - keep them out and discussed at the dinner table.

Good luck.

Sean

Footnote:  This conversation with "S" led to an exciting conversation about how her non-profit might be able to integrate social networking features into their non-profit mission!!  What a natural connection!  Damn that was a fun BBQ!

Popularity: 4% [?]

Eventually maybe I’ll do some of my own podcasts here, but for now, I’m enjoying the opportunities to do so for others.  Sue Waters with Mobile TAFE recently asked me to do a podcast (link here) and took a bit different approach than others I’ve done.  I hope you’ll give it a listen and give me your feedback the bits that worked and areas I should expand on.

Sean

Popularity: 14% [?]

It seems I might be the only web 2.0 blogger who hasn’t blogged about the trouble with community ROI.  Well, time to remedy that.  I don’t know if there is any secret sauce here, but hopefully you will see some things that are either useful or you can add to the list!

Community ROI is a high anxiety topic at every community event I’ve attended…I expect it will be again at this weeks online community unconference. (By the way, I’ll be there and I’m planning to facilitate a session on influencer programs - stop in and say hello.)  Whenever the topic comes up, I’m reminded of why I named this blog Community Group Therapy…as the discussion invariable turns into "group therapy" on the difficulty of community ROI.

Community ROI Group Therapy Session notes:

Albert:  "You know, we had our whole community planned out…forums, RSS, reputation system, it was gonna be GREAT…then that damned finance guy threw me under the bus!!  What’s the ROI he said"

Therapist:  "How does that make you feel Albert?"

Albert: "I’d like to shove his ROI right up his…."

Therapist: "Hold on!  Albert, try to stay with us here.  Who else has something to say that might help Albert on his ROI troubles."

Jerry: "I HATE OUR FRIGGIN’ FINANCE GUY TOO!!!"

Sheila:  "My boss didn’t get it either, he couldn’t even spell ‘rss’."

Therapist:  "Ok, ok everyone.  We are approaching the end of our session.  Let’s have a hug and we’ll continue this next week."

Sheila to Jerry outside the meeting:  "Are you coming next week?  I like these sessions, but I’m just not sure what I’m getting out of it."

Enough of that…let’s get back to the task at hand…the ROI model for community.  To start, what is ROI?  Well, feel free to review  Wikipedia for a more formal definition, but simplified for a business, ROI is what measurable benefit does the business get from a particular expense (often, but not solely, viewed as increased revenue or lowered costs).  I’ve see quite a few published metrics on the value of community.  For example:

-  Cost per interaction in customer support averages $12 via the contact center versus $0.25 via self-service options. (Forrester, 2006)
- Community users visit nine times more often than non-community users (McKInsey, 2000).
- Community users have four times as many page views as non-community users (McKInsey, 2000).
- 56% percent of online community members log in once a day or more (Annenberg, 2007)
- Customers report good experiences in forums more than twice as often as they do via calls or mail. (Jupiter, 2006)

These kinds of metrics provide a good framework to think about community metrics and may be very useful if you are starting a new community, but where I work, these are interesting, not fascinating.  I live in a world where industry metrics are good theory, but rarely can they stand alone and get you the needed resources to run your community.  So, hopefully we can add to the list a range of methods for ROI pursuit.

In an earlier post, I claimed that web 2.0 has the potential to impact all 3 primary functions of a business (what it builds, how it sells/markets and how it supports), so I guess it only makes sense I use these general categories for structuring the ROI discussion.  I won’t claim to use all of these, in fact, later I will encourage you NOT to use all of these.  I also won’t claim these are easy to get and measure, it takes effort and time to get there.

Support

• Content cost - Do you have a knowledgebase?  What does it cost you to author content (In house? Offshore? Vendor?)  Cost per piece of content per page view is a useful baseline metric.  Made even better if you index that against satisfaction on the content (did it help the user solve their problem).  Now, compare this model to a user generated model - do you let your enthusiasts author formal help/how to content?  Do you harvest Q&A pairs from your forums as content?  I don’t think I’ve talked to a single company that has really tied their content/documentation cost to their investments in community/user generated content.
• Content availability/coverage - What is the state of your Long Tail on content.  This is an even bigger issue than content cost - it is the opportunity cost of dissatisfied customers who don’t find answers (of course you can correlate dissatisfaction with re-purchase).  What will drive more more online success by your users…the next 10K articles you write or the next 100,000 forum, blog, wiki, podcast or other community contributions by your users?  Does online success = satisfaction?  That is certainly measurable.  The message here is that your communities are content - whatever ROI model you use today on content should apply - but don’t look at them in isolation.
• Localization - Let’s look at this separately.  Everything that is true of the limitations of your content in English is even more true in non-english.  Here’s a link to our MSDN Wiki in Brazilian Portuguese as an example.  Again, the same calculations are possible here.  Localization cost.  Content gap costs (Satisfaction correlated to repurchase). 
• Overall Support cost - And don’t forget, those that don’t find their answer online are much more likely to call your call center.  The irony here is no one wants this.  In general today, few users want to call for phone based help and support.  It’s the last resort - so, they don’t want to call you and those calls are the most expensive part of your support business - this business case has potential.  Measuring call avoidance turns out to be pretty hard - how to measure what doesn’t happen??  This is a long term metric - not your bread and butter.
• Summary - virtuous cycle - it just so happens that what your users want (great online self help) costs you less and done well delivers more content/answers for users questions resulting in higher satisfaction - ok, yes, you have to go instrument this in your world, but I can’t help with that:)  If I had to pick one thing here to figure out, it would be the following:  What is your cost, per point of user satisfaction across your support contact portfolio (Phone, web, community). 

Sales & Marketing

• Sales:  If you are driving online transactions from your web portal this should be pretty measureable.  This is not what we do, but I couldn’t leave this out of the post.
• Affinity / Loyalty / Satisfaction:  Most companies of some size run some sort of annual broad customer satisfaction survey/research methodology.   Most surveys are trying to get at driver analysis and correlation data.  This might tell you obvious things like product quality is the #1 driver of Satisfaction, but how much does support contribute?  What about content?  other indicators.  Most of us do this stuff.  The relevant issue here is whether you embedded community participation questions into your satisfaction measurement process.  Can you correlate any of the following to your users who participate in community verses those that do not?  (If you don’t have the "verses" part, you have nothing!!).  So do your users who participate in community have…
  • Higher overall satisfaction with your company? or particular product/service.
  • Higher likelihood to recommend?
  • Higher likelihood to repurchase? or purchase companion/related products/services.
  • Higher satisfaction with support?
  • Higher perception of Image or Brand?
  • hint:  I didn’t just invent this list as random examples
• Image/Brand:  If you are big brand company, you likely spend big bucks researching, building and protecting that brand.  (another hint here…anything you currently spend big bucks on is good territory for ROI…if you spend nothing on it today, your resource ask is incremental!!  It may still be good, but accept the fact that it is incremental cost!!).  There are a wealth of companies out there now offering services for online community sentiment analysis (BuzzMetrics, Clarabridge & Visible Technologies to name a few).  I’m a big fan of this as a method for improving brand/product/service research.

Product / Program Development

This is an area I have blogged about already, so for sake of shortening up this too long blog post, let me link and summarize.  This is about the following key measurement areas: Product, policy and program feedback.  Beta / pre-release feedback.  Market / Competitive research.  Supportability.

Here’s the link to previous post on Insights you can use.  The one I didn’t cover as much was Supportability, so let me expand on this.  Supportability comes in a couple of different forms:

• How do the drivers of call volume differ from the drivers of posting volume in your support forums?  Trust me - they are different!  And this is valuable/measurable. 
• What are the top issues reported by your influencers/community mavens - you need to pay particular attention to this.

The one pitfall I would point out is not to get "drunk" with the wealth of ROI model options for community.  The failure of this I think is trying to explain/pitch too many ROI benefits and the listener gets lost in your story - remember, you have the curse of knowledge.  Also remember, you are probably NOT in the community business…community is more likely a means not the end (obvious exceptions out there).  So, stop pitching community and start pitching the ROI benefits!! Online success rate!!  Satisfaction!!  Cost model improvements!  Product improvement!  This your listener will understand way better than RSS, Wiki, Forum, etc, etc, etc.

I thought I should link here to others worth reading, but a short inspection told me there were too many to list…so, feel free to scroll my blog roll and check others opinions if you’d like.  Or, I tagged some in delicious here.

Sean

Popularity: 24% [?]

Awhile back I introduced the notion of Tag Drafting as a way to think about adding efficiency to online information consumption…via topic drafting and/or author drafting.  I’m still very sold on this model in terms of how you might apply it to drive high quality content filtration to online conversations - in fact, I’m drafting every day on the topics that interest me most.

Lots to discuss here in the future about rating, reputation, voting, and social Bookmarking tools - various combinations of which offer community managers a number of new ways to improve communities both for the most active participants and equally importantly the drive-by participants or "silent searchers."

Sue Waters at Mobile Technologies in TAFE took the topic a little further in a good explanation at this link of RSS Drafting.  She was kind of enough to send me a link to extisp.icio.us.  

For those inclined to like the idea of tag drafting, this cool little tool gives you a navigable visualization diagram of a tagger’s tags in delicious.  Have a look at my visualization:  http://kevan.org/extispicious.cgi?name=seanodmvp.  Obviously I have a few topics I predominately tag about :)  But you get the idea.

It’s my belief that people who share one interest often share other and related interests as well.  I still think it is too hard to make all of this super efficient as part of my normal daily workflow, but I see a lot of great innovation leading in the right direction.  Assuming I know the delicious name, I can quickly grab the visualization, click on a tag and click on an RSS feed to everything that person tags on the topic…Love it!

More to do of course… For example, it would be really powerful if I could create custom groups of people, visualize their tags, and subscribe to a group RSS feed on the topic - a multi-author, single topic RSS feed - sounds like a combination Reputation + Bookmarking + syndication service).  If someone knows an easy way to do this, let me know:)

Late addition:  Sue also has a great Wiki article on maximizing your use of Delicious.

Sean

Popularity: 24% [?]

I recently was introduced to Paul Dunay of Buzz Marketing for Technology by Mukund of Best Engaging Communities.  Paul and I set up time for a phone call to talk with one another.  As sometimes happens, what started as a hello, let’s chat, quickly turned into a spur of the moment Podcast - welcome to the web 2.0 world that allows us to go from 1:1 conversation to public - push button!

I had a great time talking with Paul about communities…below were the topics we ranged across and here is the link to the podcast.  I know I didn’t give all these their due justice, but thanks Paul for suggesting we share the conversation!

• Communities in a wikinomics world
• Using the Pay it Forward model
• How do you know when to build community
• The problem with websites today
• Goal of a support community
• Create a sense of maternity for your users
• Give them access, not tools!
• How many communities does Microsoft have
• Connecting with your Most Valuable contributors
• Using Communities in integrated marketing
• Communities role in launching Vista
• Day to day mgmt of many communities
• Negative is the new positive
• Digg’s efforts to delete a post
• Web 2.0 vs Web 2.0 apologies

Sean

Popularity: 13% [?]

3 people helped each day, "paid forward" by each person helps 4.7M people in two weeks.

Sean

Popularity: 16% [?]