You wake up in a bathtub in Las Vegas….it’s cold…you look down and see a note…it says, call the hospital, we’ve taken your kidney.

Ever heard this urban legend?  I bet you have.

The question is why do ideas like this "stick" in our heads, but we can’t remember (or make others remember) the critical ideas we’re trying to communicate.

I would give an Oprah sized recommendation for Chip & Dan Heath’s book:  Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.

Thanks to Lee at Commoncraft for the recommendation that I am happy to endorse as well.

There is a lot to like about the book.  It’s a relatively straightforward read.  It is very instructional - meaning I can see how to implement - vs so many books that are purely conceptual.  The Authors introduce six Key qualities of an Idea that is "made to stick."

• Simplicity:  How do you strip down an idea to its core without turning it into a silly sound bite.
• Unexpectedness:  How do you capture peoples attention…and hold it?
• Concreteness:  How do you help people understand your idea and remember it much later?
• Credibility:  How do you get people to believe your idea?
• Emotional:  How do you get people to care about your idea?
• Stories:  How do you get people to act on your idea? - I loved this - I see myself often as a story teller - it’s the core of Part 1 of convincing the unconverted.

A few things really stand out for me in this book.  One is the notion of "Commanders Intent" in relating to the principal of Simplicity.  Commanders Intent is a military planning concept that essentially assumes that most planning is flawed because at the moment the enemy engages, the plan no longer applies.  The idea of Commanders Intent is describing a clear and specific enough objective such that when the enemy does engage, those on the front lines are clear enough about the end goal that they know how to adjust.  In other words, what matters is the clarity of the desired outcome over a rigid process for how to achieve the outcome.  There’s a useful description of Building Commander’s Intent from  a military standpoint .

I also really liked the exploration of the "curse of knowledge."  This is particularly evident around online communities.  How often have you heard yourself say "man, they just don’t get it" when talking about the value or importance of community to others - especially those in your company who may have to fund the investment!  The truth may be that you are so close and intimate to the topic that you make it overly complex, provide too much information, not enough information or don’t map the benefits to the goals of the other party.  If you are selling an idea, and "they don’t get it" - who is underperforming - the listener or the communicator?  Hint:  It’s not the listener!

Lastly, the value of unexpectedness.  I loved this and thought it tied in very nicely.  I tried using this recently.  To set this up, I run a multi-million dollar organization focused explicitly on the value of communities.  In a planning meeting I was asked if we were in the "community" business?  The expected and easier answer, which would have made a great question totally forgettable, would have been "yes."  The Sticky answer, was "No!  We are in the answers and feedback business!"  This simple, clear, concrete, unexpected answer provided great clarity (I think).  In one statement, we took something very nebulous and often confusing to people (community) and converted it to much clearer language that supports a commanders intent in ways that a "community" mission doesn’t.  Yes, everything we do is in communities, that doesn’t change, but clarity of purpose for what your doing there is amazingly liberating!

Sean

 

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Ok, true enough, I’m actually titling Part 5 here as "Ugly Baby."

What’s another reason why it is so important you engage with your users in your communities?  Well, I’ve talked before about several ways to build this case - links below.  Many authors and speakers who are more elegant than I like to to talk about "building customer loyalty."  Well, what does that really mean?  In a session last week I described this as the act of building a sense of maternity or paternity for your products, content, company - a sense of ownership by your users - nothing is more powerful.  It’s a simple and sticky idea (hint: book review coming soon):  Everyone has seen an ugly baby, but nobody’s baby is ever ugly.

 

For reference…links back to first 4 parts:

Part 1:  The Analogy

Part 2:  Fear by Example

Part 3:  Data / Evidence approach

Part 4:  Assumptive Close

Sean

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Ok…interesting, maybe not fascinating…but still kinda fun.

Pew Internet & American life has put up a questionnaire that once completed places you in a typology of information and communication technology Users.

I came back as an “Omnivore”, which Pew describes as follows:

Omnivores make up 8% of the American public.

Basic Description
Members of this group use their extensive suite of technology tools to do an enormous range of things online, on the go, and with their cell phones. Omnivores are highly engaged with video online and digital content. Between blogging, maintaining their Web pages, remixing digital content, or posting their creations to their websites, they are creative participants in cyberspace.

Defining Characteristics
You might see them watching video on an iPod. They might talk about their video games or their participation in virtual worlds the way their parents talked about their favorite TV episode a generation ago. Much of this chatter will take place via instant messages, texting on a cell phone, or on personal blogs. Omnivores are particularly active in dealing with video content. Most have video or digital cameras, and most have tried watching TV on a non-television device, such as a laptop or a cell phone.

Omnivores embrace all this connectivity, feeling confident in how they manage information and their many devices. This puts information technology at the center of how they express themselves, do their jobs, and connect to their friends.

Who They Are
They are young, ethnically diverse, and mostly male (70%). The median age is 28; just more than half of them are under age 30, versus one in five in the general population. Over half are white (64%) and 11% are black (compared to 12% in the general population). English-speaking Hispanics make up 18% of this group. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many (42% versus the 13% average) of Omnivores are students.

 The survey must be imperfect (all are)…as much of the above really is not me:

• I don’t use an enormous suite of tools for super diverse things online - I’m kinda boring.
• I don’t really do much video or digital content re-mixing.
• I don’t own an IPod - but I have watched broadcast TV via my laptop.
• Not sure how confident I feel in my “connected-ness” - I often find myself envying others who seem to get it so much more effortlessly than me.
• I’m not young (by this survey’s standard) - and I’m not ethnically diverse - though the description they use seems to say this group is diverse and then uses facts that make that not seem to be the case.

Overall, I would self assess myself closer to a Connector and/or Productivity enhancer.   Here’s the typology from Pew - take the test and see what you think.

 

 Sean

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On Tuesday, May 8th, I’m presenting a breakout with the above title at SSPA in San Diego.  I’ve put together an abstract of my talk below.  Knowing me, it will be interesting to compare what comes out of my mouth, with my in advance prepared content.  I have a hard time not free wheeling a bit on my content as I go:)

Here’s the abstract:

Where’s the first place you go for help, support and advice on all the products and services you use in your daily life?  “www.company.com?”  That’s probably not your first stop.  Most of us go to “our community.”  That is, the personal network we are connected with:  friends, family, neighbors, etc.  Why?  Our personal networks offer a lot of benefits.  They have diverse areas of expertise, they are trusted, they are accessible, and they generally “speak our language” – not linguistically, but like a user verses a sales person or support professional. 

The challenge with our “personal networks” is that they are finite.  They may not be deep enough on a topic or broad enough across new areas of interest.  Enter online or virtual communities.  The proliferation of online communities in recent years has democratized access to information, experiences and expertise on virtually every subject and in nearly every language in the world.  As a user, you now have a choice between your personal network, vast online communities (peer users), and your suppliers for help and support.  Each of these sources provides certain advantages (credibility, authority, camaraderie, indemnification/quality assurance, accessibility, timeliness, guaranteed answer, etc) and disadvantages (scope, trust, cost, etc.) 

Given this new dynamic, how are you defining your approach to online help and support to balance both traditional online support experiences and integrating communities into the assistance workflow?  Our objective is to deliver the best of both worlds.  This means migrating your customers from “trusting your content” to a model where customers “trust the experience” you deliver.  In other words, the content you will now deliver will be a superset of the content you author, so how will you assure your users that this user generated content is easy to use, easy to trust and easy to find?

At Microsoft, online communities offer the single largest opportunity to dramatically increase the breadth and depth of available content on our products and services.  While we are not in the “content business,” we are in the answer business from a customer support experience standpoint.  Integrating the value of the vast repository of user generated content and independent answerers is no simple task. 

As a starting point, let’s set a context for what we mean by communities.  The industry today is awash in community buzz words:  “virtual, online, web 2.0, social networking, peering, participative web, etc.”  For Microsoft, communities represent anywhere users go online to interact with one another to gain knowledge and/or expertise.  As you set the landscape for your communities a few key principles emerge:

• Communities are User Driven.  The best communities have you as a participant, but not as the driver.
• Communities are not just about forums or Question & Answer pairs.  While forums are a great starting point, user participation can come in many other ways:  Blogs, Wikis, podcasts, videocasts, content rating, tagging, RSS subscriptions, “user Gen-next?”  Content authoring and forum answering may be exceptionally valuable today, but other, lighter weight participation models may be equally important over time.
• Communities are a combination of venues/destinations, relationships, tools and processes.  Without adequate planning across all these pillars, challenging roadblocks will emerge.
• Our communities are not confined to destinations across www.Microsoft.com.

While there is an explosion in social networking technologies that enable many of these community models, there are also a set of industry and social trends driving this evolution.  Take developers for example, our experience is that developers dramatically prefer to self-solve issues versus calling for support.  This is a reflection of evolving preferred work-styles.  At the same time, those entering the workforce today are by-products of the “MySpace” generation – a generation of social and peer networkers.  In the years to come, it seems clear this will emerge as a dominate model for help and support.

The next issue to address is affirming the business purpose for investing in community work. This will define whether you check the community box or ingrain it into your long term online support strategy.  Online communities can benefit the support function, the marketing function and the product development function.  Establishing priority will drive one of the key challenges for communities:  landing the right near and longer term KPIs. 

At Microsoft, I would set the priorities as Support and Product insight with little direct investments in marketing via community.  This drives how we think about KPIs:  Reach, Success/answer rate, Satisfaction and cost. 

Integrating community and online can be described as a 3 step process.

1)      Understand the community demographics:  What communities already exist around your products?  Are they communities you host and/or 3^rd party.  How big are they?  How are you going to approach the legal and policy issues to ensure you have a framework for risk management that doesn’t unrealistically constrain your support of community content?  If you haven’t already, when are you going to join the community?  Do you have a credible presence there already?  If not, that is a natural and necessary starting point.  Who are the influencers?  You need to identify them, thank them AND engage with them.

2)      Integrate community and support workflows:  This speaks to the preferred work style of our users.  Do the phone, the web and community feel like 3 distinct support options and workflows, or is it one integrated end to end experience?  The theme we are targeting here is “search-ability” – of support AND user generated content.  These initiatives include online workflow & search, online submission, rapid publishing, supported communities and expanded influencer recognition programs with a focus on service delivery mix-shift from phone, online reach, answer rate and satisfaction.

3)      Leveraging the Wisdom of the Crowds:  In the future state, the aspiration shifts from “search-ability” to “find-ability.”  At this point you’re not just looking at the sum of user generated content, but you are deploying specific strategies for filtering, rating and rendering that proactively presents that content to your users based on their profile and/or past support interactions.  A key indicator here will be progressively “stickier” community participation.

This road to online and community is not without its “potholes.”  Two film metaphors apply to this business, “Field of Dreams” and “Pay it Forward.”  Remember, “Field of Dreams” was just a movie – if you build a community, that doesn’t mean customers will come.  Furthermore, the legal construct can derail your plans and progress. So engage legal advice early and often in determining how you implement (not whether or not you should). 

I would also highlight that your communities are not YOUR communities; they belong to your customers.  You should be a purposeful and engaged neighbor in that community, but there is great danger in overpowering the community.  A topic that often comes up is controlling the community and I’d note that the effort spent to control a community and your ability to control it are inversely related.  And lastly, landing metrics is not easy.  The reporting and analytics in this space are still immature and require considerable planning and internal negotiations to gain alignment.

In summary, the 3 steps above take us from a support value proposition, to a Support, Enable and User Participative value proposition.  It’s important to acknowledge that your community likely already exists (if this is not the case, you may have a different problem.)  Earning the right to participate in that community as a credible peer is a key and non-trivial opportunity. 

PS:  If you’d like the slides that go with this, drop me an email:  and I’ll forward.

Sorry for the long post:)

Sean

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I met last week in Sonoma at the Online Community Business Forum.  I once blogged here:  Are you curious enough to be a Web 2.0 leader? Well, Shara is certainly curious!  Take a look at the great resource list categorized .

Thanks Shara!

Sean

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I recently did a podcast for Aaron Strout of Shared Insights.  Joining me was Mukund Mohan from the Canvas Group.  Thought I’d share the link here to the podcast hosted on the .

Sean

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Today at the Online Community Business Summit I had the good fortune of jointly presenting with my counterpart from Apple.  It gave us an intimidating opportunity to talk with a group of our industry peers about the work we are doing with online communities and in particular the roles we play in our respective companies focused on enthusiasts.  I’ve blogged before about corporate transparency and the opportunity you have to change the way people see your company - to humanize your company.  After all, it’s not that hard to dislike a company, but it is hard to dislike good people once you’ve met them.  Offline events are always a great reminder of this and for those of you who are doing online community work…do NOT ignore the importance of offline connection.

Beyond Apple, I also met passionate people from EBay, Dell, Yahoo, Lithium, Solidworks, Autodesk…and on and on.  Meeting people always changes the way you think about what you do, the business you’re in and the way you want to relate with others.  I had a great time.  I think a few attendees were genuinely surprised to see Me and Mac get along so well - for the record, both Mac and I thought that was weird - we are support and community people…not marketers.  We had fun opening the session with "Hi PC, Hi Mac."  I couldn’t resist going on to say the following:  "Mac and I agreed not to have slides as he really wanted to show a creative video he made and I just want to show Excel cost models for Community ROI."  Thanks to our fellow attendees for letting us have fun.

So, in the spirit of community, let’s not think about what separates, but what binds:

• Mac and I both make a living thinking and working hard on communities
• We both focus on support, help and how-to communities
• We both think and talk daily with the most active enthusiasts that are a part of our communities
• We both love technology and what it empowers people to do
• We’ve both been at our respective companies for over 10 years
• We both think the Zune is the best music device on the market…oops, nope…
• We are both the same age, and….
• We both love pork….and in particular are passionate about bacon!!

So Mac, great to meet you and looking forward to the next time!

Sean, I mean, "PC"

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nice work goes to:  http://xkcd.com/c256.html?floam

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I just finished a stimulating Day 1 at Forum One’s online community business forum.  So far, so good!  I like small conferences with a focus on conversations and this one meets the bill…with just 50 or so attendees.  Had a nice dinner tonight with peers from , and Lithium.

The day started with a round of introductions (ok, after 18 holes of golf with my colleague at Chardonnay Golf Club!!)  With the audience size, this is a great and gives a quick way to understand key interest areas and zero in on who I want to talk to most.  Here are some topics that were common discussion points:

• Globalization and Localization issues
• ROI / monetization / value prop to business decision makers to invest
• Community and internal company content "connectivity"
• Moderation and Community change management best practices and tough situations
• Segmentation
• Gift economy vs paid models
• "boomers" and communities
• Privacy and social responsibility
• Corporate culture implications
• Legal
• Nuturing your most active core contributors
• Brand implications
• Community as a source of market / product insight

This was followed by talks on New opportunities with online community, Dimensions of Value in engaging communities and Community ROI.

All in all, I enjoyed the day and it reminded me of why I named this blog what I did…a sense of common need for group therapy on all these topics!!

If I had to pick one topic from today that I will think more on, it came from .  Bob talked about the relative value of location based community (community defined by it’s venue) vs connection based communities (which are more likely defined by the participants and their movements between and across communities).  I liked the concept as a way to think about some of the challenges associated with building value (both external and internal) from similar, but highly fractured/distributed communities.  Good topic for me to sit down and wrestle to the ground.

Sean

 

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In my earlier series starting with convincing the unconverted on community, I wrote in part 4 about the "assumptive close".  In it, I said the following:

Users are going to talk about your products, policies, licensing, people, everything! You really don’t get to decide this. The only decision you get to make is whether or not to participate in that conversation. You must also accept the fact that you CANNOT control the conversation. In fact, the harder you try the more impossible it is.

I guess we’ve seen a reminder about the inverse relationship between how hard you try to control the community and your ability to control it…oh how I hope I never have to learn this lesson so personally.

Obviously the trade industry lawyers for AACS hadn’t read the advice and regrettably the folks at Digg got caught between a no win and apparent litigation.  An interesting story to think through…here’s my favorite quote from the article:

An online uproar came in response to a series of cease-and-desist letters from lawyers for a group of companies that use the copy protection system, demanding that the code be removed from several Web sites.

Rather than wiping out the code …the legal notices sparked its proliferation on Web sites, in chat rooms, inside cleverly doctored digital photographs and on user-submitted news sites like Digg.com.

“It’s a perfect example of how a lawyer’s involvement can turn a little story into a huge story,” said Fred von Lohmann, a staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group. “Now that they started sending threatening letters, the Internet has turned the number into the latest celebrity. It is now guaranteed eternal fame.”

Sean

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