NetApp – Earning Value from Online Community

“Active members using our community to interact and engage with us controlled hundreds of millions of dollars in sales revenue over a 6 month period.

Active partners of NetApp engaging in the community delivered over half a billion dollars in partner owned sales revenue over the same time period.”

- Navneet Grewal, Director Digital Marketing

Introduction: NetApp launched its first online community in early 2008 to help executives engage and gain a stronger understanding of the products and solutions offered by NetApp as well as to build awareness for the growing storage industry among IT professionals. The initial community, built on Jive Software, was growing in size but engagement behavior and value derived from the community was low. Beginning in August of 2008, NetApp hired Impact Interactions to rebuild their strategy, help the company better meet the needs of its community, and align reporting to real world business goals that demonstrate the value of their community.

Addressing the Issues: After a review of the community, a competitive analysis, and review of appropriate metrics, the Impact Interactions’ team identified several areas which were limiting NetApp’s business results. The main areas of focus for our work included:

1. Restructuring the community’s offerings and forums to meet member needs and provide a clear path to engagement and value (Products and Services categories were redefined to meet member expectations and to provide a stronger focus, changed the community’s architecture to allow member measurement using the Jive Software analytics, and reduced the categories of available forums in order to concentrate conversations in appropriate areas to reduce the cost and time of moderation)
2. Redefining processes of managing the community using our best practices (Engagement and escalation processes, internal subject matter expert recruitment)
3. External member recognition process
4. Alignment of content strategy to NetApp’s business goals (Increased percentage of thought leadership content to attract influencers & decision makers, added partner focused forum & content to recruit NetApp partners into the community as subject matter experts, refocused outreach to concentrate less on technical information and more on business results  like TCO, ROI, Customer Success Stories)
5. Internal team education (Training on B2B focused approach using Impact Interactions’ best practices and experience, reduced B2C tactics that focused on awareness and pushing information rather than building engagement and relationships with members)
6. Understanding key metrics to report to build a health index for the community while also setting achievable KPIs (key performance indicators)
7. Developed measurement framework utilizing Jive Software, Omniture, and Business Objects to deliver focused reports (Traffic – baseline metrics, Behavior – engagement metrics, Value – business metrics with an economic value $ assigned)

The team at NetApp realigned their community using Impact Interactions’ recommendations. One of the main changes was moving forum categories into distinct sub-communities on the Jive platform in order to increase visibility into how members were using each area of the community. Initially, all areas had been under a single community architecture which due to Jive Software analytic limitations reduced visibility significantly into how individual areas of the community were performing.

Social Media Supports Community to Engage Members: As part of Impact Interactions’ ongoing engagement with NetApp, we performed a full social media audit to understand how audiences outside of the community had their information needs met. Having the social media run by their Public Relations firm for the previous two years had achieved minimal results. This was due to poor alignment, execution, and messaging using social tactics such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Twitter, LinkedIn Groups, and Facebook were simply used as RSS fed message repeaters without a clear goal or objective for each entity. This caused the same exact message to be placed in multiple places despite different audiences. The result was that there was no integration of effort to utilize the strong results of the community with the marketing efforts of the PR firm’s actions. This wasted effort resulted in many lost opportunities for valuable engagement.

To correct this, as part of our strategy work, Impact Interactions recommended the following tactical changes to NetApp’s current strategy. First, the team needed to refocus social away from press release based activities to deliver integrated marketing, digitally relevant content, video, and thought leadership which was missing in action. In conjunction with this refocusing, there also needed to be a realignment of social effort to integrate community, NetApp.com, and digital marketing assets to better meet the information needs of multiple audiences using social tools. While the audiences are similar, there are differences in how segments like to gather information and interact with companies. This requires a stronger focus on each platform’s unique audience to meet their needs properly.  We also recommended that NetApp develop a social listening program to expand the influencers’ network and cultivate stronger relationships outside of existing channels.

For internal teams, we recommended that NetApp align internal efforts through social media guidelines and processes including the use of a social media and community playbook to educate multiple stakeholder teams throughout the organization. To allow for self-service reporting and measurement, it was recommended that NetApp develop a social media dashboard to report results across the enterprise, including CRM data as the value point to prove the importance of the social and community projects in meeting specific business objectives (and KPIs).

Business Results Achieved: Over the last three years, NetApp continued to focus on meeting members’ needs in order to build engagement. This focus increased engagement significantly over time allowing Impact Interactions to implement its value framework methodology to demonstrate the economic value of the community to senior management. This framework was built using data from multiple sources including Jive Software, Omniture, and NetApp’s CRM system and was completed in 2011.

The measured results were impressive. As detailed in a presentation at iStrategy’s San Francisco meeting by Navneet Grewal, active members (defined as those who contribute more than 10 items in a six month period) using NetApp’s marketing community to interact and engage controlled hundreds of millions of dollars in sales revenue over a 6 month period. During the same time period, active partners of NetApp engaging in the marketing community delivered over half a billion dollars in partner owned sales revenue to NetApp.

Summary and Takeaways: By realigning its community to focus strongly on influencers and business decision makers, NetApp has realized significant economic value from its community.

1. Lesson One: Don’t allow the limitations of your software platform mislead you into believing that value cannot be measured
2. Lesson Two: Use an architectural scheme that provides the most insight into member activities while providing a clear path for engagement to members
3. Lesson Three: Identify your audience clearly and provide content that meets their needs in order to build engagement both in controlled sites (community) and non-controlled (social)
4. Lesson Four: Be wary of using press releases as a major component of your social content strategy
5. Lesson Five: Each social site has a slightly different audience that is linked to your organization for a slightly different reason. Utilize a content focus that aligns to those needs rather than shot-gunning the same content everywhere
6. Lesson Six: Getting to the value is hard work. It requires relationships, strong data analysis, and the ability to combine your CRM data with your community and/or social data.

When organizations meet the needs of their audiences, the value realized can be substantial as the results of NetApp clearly show. To learn how your organization can benefit from our expertise, please contact us.

 

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Case Study – DS Callards Gets Results With Social Media Alignment

SOCIAL MEDIA SUPPORTS EVENT MARKETING CAMPAIGN

“Harnessing Social Media channels such as Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook, with thought-leadership content in the form of videos and blogs, has helped endorse our position as leaders in the field of BI.” – Adrianne Gillies, DSCallards Marketing Manager

Key Learnings

Although familiar with the many available avenues of social media communication, SAP Partner DSCallards was using social media primarily for brand awareness and didn’t consider it a key marketing tool prior to the pilot project supported by Impact Interactions. This project taught DSCallards how it could use its existing social media accounts to promote itself as a thought leader to generate valuable sales contacts and to nurture leads. As a result of its social media campaign work, DSCallards saw a 161% increase in referrals from its social media accounts to its two websites. In fact, the number of social media referrals to DSCallards’ websites during the pilot was equivalent to the total number of referrals the company had seen during the previous ten months. All of these results were realized during a six week pilot to implement a comprehensive plan of social media curation, creation, and promotion.

Pilot Program

DSCallards is a full service business intelligence solution provider offering both consulting services and customized development.  Based out of Ashburton, UK, DSCallards has established itself as one of the best business intelligence solution providers in the UK and has a robust business surrounding its partnership with SAP. According to Adriane Gillies, DSCallards Marketing Manager:

“When combined with our fully accredited professional services and methodologies, DSCallards provides solutions that offer the most complete, open and integrated BI systems on the market today.  Our goal is to ensure that every business, regardless of size, can understand and use information without technical expertise or knowledge of underlying data sources or structure, empowering them to get answers to imperative business questions and to make more effective, better informed, decisions.”

Despite their win as the UK Champion of the SAP Social Media Program 2010 and again as UK Champion of the SAP Best Performance Challenge 2011, DSCallards continued to utilize its social media accounts as a secondary tactic for awareness. DSCallards maintained accounts with LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, etc. but wasn’t entirely focused on using these venues for lead generation. For the most part, DSCallards used their corporate accounts to retweet posts from the Twitter account of Lee Grogan, DSCallards Sales Manager, and to promote videos entered for the SAP Best Performance Challenge. DSCallards was utilizing social media as a way to increase brand awareness instead of relying on it as a means of building contacts and leads:

“Although happy with output from our efforts, we were not convinced that social media was an effective channel for driving forward demand generation and was more of an awareness and brand building exercise.”  – Adriane Gillies

While brand awareness is important, Philip Roylance, UK Enablement manager for SAP, saw an opportunity for its partner to look at social media as much more than an internet billboard.  Through its two SAP wins, DSCallards demonstrated it was savvy enough to take on the task of creating a social media campaign. In selecting DSCallards for this pilot, Philip stated:

“DSCallards has worked closely with SAP on projects in the past and were an excellent candidate for us to run a social media campaign with. Social media has become a very important part of SAPs marketing strategy and we need to work with partners who are able to demonstrate the agility and tenacity needed to make campaigns successful. DSCallards has shown this in abundance.”

To get DSCallards off on the right foot, Philip turned to U.S. based social media consulting firm Impact Interactions for help in assisting DSCallards with the implementation of a robust social media marketing campaign that would address the business objectives of thought leadership, contact generation, contact nurturing, brand awareness, and the promotion of SAP solutions. With over ten years of experience with SAP, Impact Interactions has a proven record of assisting companies increase their online presence. With two of DSCallards’ popular breakfast marketing meetings approaching, the time was right to launch a comprehensive campaign.

Tactical Planning for a Social Media Campaign

At the beginning of a social media campaign, both Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and initial metric benchmarks must be determined.  For DSCallards, there were several measurable KPIs:

• Increased registration for morning meetings
• Increased reach
• Increased blog visits
• Increased website visibility

The following DSCallards’ social media accounts were analyzed before the pilot kick-off to create the projects initial benchmarks:

• YouTube:
• Channel Views
• Individual video views
• Number of referrals from YouTube to website
• Twitter
• Followers
• Number of referrals from Twitter to website
• LinkedIn
• Connections
• Number of referrals from LinkedIn to website
• Blog
• Visits
• Number of referrals  from blog to website

Additionally, benchmarks were taken for the number of registrations DSCallards had acquired for their two upcoming meetings utilizing email lists, web site contact us submissions, and in-house contact lists.

Once the KPIs and benchmarks were determined, DSCallards orchestrated an effort to integrate all marketing accounts in order to meet their KPIs.  Previously, DSCallards had viewed their social media accounts as separate, stand-alone entities. Rather than each account being an item in its social media marketing menu, each was looked at as a stand-alone item in and of itself.  This approach had the unfortunate effect of fragmenting its social and online audiences.  DSCallards’ blog readers weren’t readily aware of its Twitter account.  The Twitter followers didn’t know DSCallards had valuable content on its YouTube site, etc.  In addition to these tactics, DSCallards relied heavily on email lists to send out SAP content based newsletters and to announce its popular breakfast meeting series. However, it did little to utilize social media to advertise those meetings or tie the content of the email newsletters into other interactive outlets which again left much of its online audience unaware of the benefits of attending these important meetings.

Impact Interactions introduced DSCallards to the concept of “Beacon Strategy Marketing.” Using this method, every form of social media is used to link back to the main form of communication for DSCallards, its website. YouTube videos linked back to relevant meeting registration information through descriptions and annotations. Twitter activity transitioned from being primarily retweets of Lee Grogan’s tweets to advertisements of new additions to their blog, LinkedIn groups, and upcoming meetings. LinkedIn activity increased with the initiation of more discussions and, again, consistently linked readers back to DSCallards’ website. Blog posts were skillfully mentioned across several platforms. Over the six weeks of the pilot, DSCallards learned how to tailor each message to the platform they were using.  Instead of repeating the same cookie cutter information across the different platforms, the message was finessed and adjusted for each audience. Recipients were getting the same information without seeing a copy and paste of text from one social media interaction to the next.

Challenges During The Campaign

The pilot did not come without its challenges, however.  Several events occurred that impacted the overall results of the campaign.  First, the December meeting was scheduled to take place at a location further from London and less accessible to participants than made sense for a two hour breakfast meeting. Consequently, registrations remained low for the December meeting. That said, despite the fact that its December breakfast meeting was the original focus of the pilot project, DSCallards decided to cancel the meeting and reschedule it for a time when it could be hosted at a better location.

From that point on, DSCallards decided to instead focus on a November meeting which was taking place a better location and featured a more popular subject.  Second, DSCallards had invested in an email list for sending out information regarding their monthly meetings.  Unfortunately, the list hadn’t been properly scrubbed for accuracy. DSCallards found itself relying on a list that largely consisted of invalid email addresses. The team at DSCallards had to scramble mid-pilot to try to purchase another list and send out the meeting information again.  By that point, though, DSCallards had largely missed its window for giving people enough lead time to plan for the trip to the more distant SAP location in December.

A secondary issue which impacted expected results was the implementation of a new website and blog platform. While a positive from an information standpoint as well as from an improved user experience standpoint, the new site provided new challenges in the campaign. First, new links needed to be featured for the social media promotions while the older links took visitors to the older site information. While the visitor could then click to the event registration, the dual site issue may have caused some initial confusion among visitors reducing results.

Results

For DSCallards, the company achieved great success achieving the long-­term goals of increasing in their reach, generating important business contacts, and establishing itself as a thought leader. DSCallards proved that social media could be used for far more than simply creating awareness of the date and time of its training meetings. Looking at specific Social Media Channels to develop and connect with contacts, prospects, and leads, DSCallards did very well in adapting its approach to include social media into its marketing mix. Specific channel results are given below:

Twitter: 370% increase in Twitter Followers

During the pilot, groups of potential followers were identified and followed. By reaching out first, DSCallards was effectively holding out a laurel to their audience.  Following them first would hopefully peak their interest enough that the person on the other end would return the favor. The tactic worked.  Over the six week pilot, DSCallards saw its Twitter following quadruple with significant retweeting of their information through their followers’ networks. Not only did this give DSCallards the opportunity to present itself as a thought leader but it also presented the company as another option for a business intelligence solution provider. They established both brand awareness and their reputation as an experienced and knowledgeable organization.

LinkedIn: 120% increase in site visits from LinkedIn Group posts

By utilizing LinkedIn Groups focused on Business Intelligence, Manufacturers, and Analytics, the team at DSCallards was able to guide additional traffic to its own blogs and web site. Once on the site, visitors were presented with the opportunity to learn more as well as to gain an invitation to one of the DSCallards’ breakfast meetings.

YouTube: 10% increase in video views, 6% increase in Channel Visits over 6 week campaign

During the pilot project, DSCallards took time to nurture its YouTube account.  After the Best Performance Challenge, the YouTube account was not frequently updated as an avenue to push viewers back to its website.  Additionally, several of the videos DSCallards posted were simply reposts of SAP content.  As an SAP partner this content was acceptable and may have created some needed awareness for DSCallards’ audience, but it didn’t present DSCallards as a thought leader. Once DSCallards began using the “beacon strategy” the company took greater care to ensure the content on its site was both valuable and original.  DSCallards took SAP-­supplied videos and dubbed them over with its own script which had the effect of making the videos more “personal.” It literally gave a voice to DSCallards. It also gave viewers the sense that DSCallards, every bit as much as SAP, understood the subject matter and had valuable expertise to offer.  Now, when visitors to the DSCallards’ YouTube account look at videos, they are presented with content DSCallards has customized and tailored to its audience  rather than a small number of  DSCallards videos dwarfed by a large number of SAP provided videos that have no tie to DSCallards as a company.

Blog: 20 fold increase in reads of blog content

DSCallards’ use of other social media outlets to drive readers to its blog worked phenomenally well and resulted in 20 times more visits to the blog in November as compared to October.  DSCallards made great efforts to post blog content updates more frequently than in the past and tailored each post to the subject matter of its upcoming breakfast meetings. Both of these efforts created the opportunity to passively advertise DSCallards’ meetings to its readers on their social media accounts while also promoting thought leadership in the BI area. Through these blog posts DSCallards presented themselves as thought leaders offering valuable content worth reading and training sessions worth attending.

Overall Traffic

Thanks to the many improvements to their social media communications DSCallards saw a very important improvement to quite possibly its most important customer­-facing outlet: the company website. The impact of a well coordinated social media campaign to support marketing efforts can be seen by the dramatic increase in referrals to the DSCallards’ websites from their social media accounts.

The metrics clearly demonstrated that DSCallards was now driving interested parties back to its website, where they could find a wealth of information about the company’s offerings.  Referrals increased across the board, proving that DSCallards’ tactics in all areas were working together to improve the effectiveness of DSCallards’ marketing efforts.

“Having worked with Mike and his team at Impact Interactions, we now believe that cleverly combining traditional marketing techniques with the power of Social Media and becoming thought leaders in the field of BI is a winning strategy for DSCallards as we make inroads into our chosen markets in the coming years. 

Harnessing Social Media channels such as Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook, with thought-leadership content in the form of videos and blogs, has helped endorse our position as leaders in the field of BI. 

We are looking forward to transferring the skills learned throughout this pilot and putting the Social Media methodology that Mike and his team developed for us into practice during 2012.  By applying this methodology to our SAP Crystal solutions campaigns, where we believe we are already looked upon as thought-leaders, we are confident of our continued success.”

– Adrianne Gillies, DSCallards Marketing Manager

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What we have here is a failure to analyze

There’s one word that can simultaneously strike fear in the hearts of business owners while making communications gurus light up like a Christmas tree: analytics. This new digital world we live in has brought with it a boat load of data and where there’s data there’s the need for data analysis and market awareness. Now, sales data is typically pretty straightforward: We made X number of sales and brought in Y number of dollars. But what about marketing data analysis? Ah, that’s the one that makes people run and hide. Why? Because it’s never black and white. Are Likes the same thing as Follows? Is it something we can monetize? How much does reach matter? Do we even know what we’re doing?

I read a very interesting report yesterday by the Columbia Business School called “Marketing ROI in the Era of Big Data.” It was all about measuring marketing ROI. Some of the stats in there were mind boggling and all in the wrong ways. For one thing, it seems that companies are playing a budgeting crapshoot:

“…but many managers aren’t measuring marketing ROI either consistently or effectively.
Only 43% of organizations are establishing their marketing budgets based on marketing ROI
analysis. By contrast, 68% base their marketing budgets in part on “historical spending,”
and 28% on “gut instincts.” When it comes to specific marketing spending decisions, 21%
are using financial metrics for little or none of those specific decisions, and 7% are making
all or most of those spending decisions with no metrics at all.”

Even worse, the people who are in charge think they know what they’re doing while those down in the trenches are shaking their heads:

“Satisfaction depends on your viewpoint: 54% of CMO’s are satisfied with their ability
to measure marketing ROI, but only 43% of those below the vice president level are satisfied –
perhaps because they are closer to the problem of determining how to most effectively
measure marketing ROI.”

The final stake in the heart was this one:

“In place of marketing ROI, many traditional measures are used. 37% of the respondents claimed that they used brand awareness as a universal metric to make marketing decisions. More troubling, of those using brand awareness, more than 60% said it was their only marketing ROI measure.”

Where do I begin?!

Get your ducks in a row

Well, let’s begin with KPIs. I’m going to go out on a limb and say people who say social media can’t be measured probably don’t have a good understanding of organizational KPIs and how to develop them. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, everything can be measured. The key to understanding KPIs, though, is that you can’t use someone else’s KPIs. You need to understand where you want to go as an organization and how each piece of your marketing scheme fits into that. You can’t track Likes on Facebook because Joe Schmidt at URCompetitor does. First you have to ask yourself: “What are we trying to do with each of these pieces?” Brand awareness? Driving traffic back to the website? Conversion rates on offers? Those are what you need to determine first and then you use the analytics to back it up.

I’ve got all this data but it doesn’t amount to any ROI

Are you sure about that? Here’s where I might blow some minds. To me, there are two types of ROI: tangible and intangible. Both are vitally important. Tangible ROI is, of course, money. You had X number of hard leads, Y number of sales, Z number of people coming to your site and making a purchase. But then there are the intangible. Do visits alone make you money? Perhaps you don’t see the dollar signs in your account but that doesn’t mean you didn’t get a ROI. Content consumption is a good example of an intangible ROI. You didn’t get a lead this month from social media but you improved your reputation. You personally reached out to 80% of the posters on your Twitter account. You have more mentions this month than last month and 95% of those are positive. Can your competitors say that? No, that doesn’t bring in direct dollars but your good reputation eventually will.

Dashboards are your friends

The beauty of business analytics these days is that you aren’t limited to spreadsheets and simple charts. I wonder if some of the resistance to truly analyzing all that data comes from the inability to get it into a format that’s easy for people to look at. I do a dashboard for a client every month that pulls analytics from at least 4 sources. The set up of the dashboard itself was indeed complicated but the hardest part was learning how to write the formulas. Thankfully, there are tons of resources out there so that shouldn’t stop you.

This dashboard is effective because we can look at all of this data and easily understand it. There’s no scrolling through hundreds of data points trying to find the one you need and compare it against the past. We simply pick a month and the dashboard dynamically changes to show us all the data for that month. I did another dashboard that was far more complex looks wise but, again, it allowed us to pull data from multiple sources into one place that was easy for the non technical people to understand. You could show and hide multiple data sets. You could customize the data to show exactly what you were looking for. The important thing to note is that neither of these dashboards shows sales data. It is all marketing/communication data that gives the clients insight into how users are consuming their communications.

As I said, the set up times for these can be intense but it’s worth it in the end. If you think it isn’t then just listen for that voice of your superior asking you to explain all the mumbo jumbo numbers in your 12 sheet workbook. It’s worth it.

Learn to love analytics

The bottom line is if you’re concerned about ROI you need to get friendly with analytics. They aren’t your enemy. Analytics are like the force in Star Wars. They’re in the sales, the leads, the blogs, the likes, the traffic, and the comments. They’re in everything and they ALL have an effect on your ROI. Please do yourself a favor and don’t rely on your “gut instinct” because that will just give you an ulcer. Also do yourself a favor and read “Marketing ROI in the Era of Big Data.” It’s an eye opening report and well worth the read.

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Communities.cisco.com Reaps Rewards of Sound Strategy

Success in the B2B online community space seems to come from just the opposite of what many companies actually put into it: planning , teamwork and transparency. That’s right. Some companies we talk to or observe online still aren’t grasping the concept that communities need a dedicated team and strategy to thrive.

Communities.cisco.com, on the other hand, gets it. A platform that contains more than 50 communities for Cisco’s partners, customers and employees, communities.cisco.com, also known as Cisco Communities, has almost doubled its membership and has seen a 50% increase in overall traffic in the last year. Additionally, Cisco continues to see measurable savings and efficiencies as a result of the program. Allison Johnson, Social Media and Community Manager at Cisco, who has worked with Cisco for 5 years and communities.cisco.com for the past year and a half, discusses the ingredients that make up Cisco’s recipe for success and the challenges of managing a successful global community platform.

Q: What is your role at communities.cisco.com?

A:  At Cisco I manage the communities.cisco.com platform in addition to driving social media and digital marketing across the company.

When working on the communities platform I oversee the entire program at a macro level. My team and I work on everything from identifying technical problems and scheduling the bug fixes as well as onboarding new teams and setting up the overall program structure. We work closely with the community managers to help them reach their individual goals as well as goals we have for the program.

Sometimes we joke around that in my role I’m essentially a community manager of community managers. Every day is different and I never know what hat or situation I’ll find myself in. A main focus for us is our long-term strategy. People forget that communities are a long-term commitment and it’s essential to align your long-term plan with corporate strategies and initiatives. At the end of the day, the most important thing I can do is give the community managers the tools they need to be successful.

Q: What’s your vision for communities.cisco.com and its business purpose?

A: We set both short-term and long-terms goals for the program. Our 5-year vision is to sustain and create a global community program that deepens relationships with partners, customers and employees. Getting there involves building out some of our core areas to make them more engaging and relevant. We’re in the process of a study to learn more about behaviors. Currently we added a social share functionality to the platform to encourage conversations that are happening in the social web to interact and share with our communities.

Q: Tell us about some of the success you’ve seen as you’ve worked toward that vision.

A: This past year we saw tremendous growth in registrations (more than 50% to more than 110,000). Overall that is one of our largest success metrics. Monthly, we capture metrics and do analysis on our platform. This past year we’ve seen a lot of growth. Ways we hope to continue this growth are building out case studies and best practice sharing modules from these growth spikes.

A more specific example can be seen in our Partner Community. This private space was built for our Cisco partners and we have seen it contribute to reducing travel and increasing the productivity of Cisco experts. These experts travel most of the time and have little time for face-to face interactions with our partners. Now these experts broadcast training sessions for partners on communities, which achieves the goal of deepening relationships with our partners.

The common theme here is that the Web 2.0 technology that communities use can positively impact the business by encouraging innovation, reducing travel costs, opening communication and open up resources. Another way we’re positively impacting the business is that we are capturing and sharing frequently asked questions and conversations within the community. We have a wider reach and we’re able to answer more than one person’s question online. If someone else has the same question it’s all right there with a paper trail.  Communities.cisco.com have proven to be a very transparent, authentic way to communicate so more than one person is able to benefit.

Q: Those are impressive results. What are some recent milestones you’ve reached in terms of overall traffic and membership?

A: Our membership a year ago was at about 74K. We are now at about 113K. In 2011, we saw more than a  50% increase in overall membership and traffic. And, we’re also happy about the response time we’re seeing. Support questions usually get at least one or multiple responses within 24 hours.

Q: What are a few best practices you can outline that have helped achieve these results?

A: Open and frequent communications are a must when you are working with a group this large. We have an open bi-weekly Community Manager meeting to serve as a communication platform as well as a best practice share and overall time to update one another on the various projects we have in the works. We set the agenda in advance and we have an area in our own Community Managers Community, completely dedicated to presentations delivered and communications relayed in these meetings. We encourage CMs to bring up topics they want to cover as well as set the agenda for future facing meetings. Not limiting ourselves, we also bring in our external networks.  I think it’s really valuable that we’re always willing to learn from internal and experts about how to best manage the platform.

Additionally, every community has an established and committed community manager. You must always have one point of contact for each space. This way that person can drive communications about the community and content within their space. It is also imperative that they manage the editorial calendar. This is another best practice.

Overall the CM will coordinate with campaigns in different parts of the organization to drive awareness. Some may also work with hired moderators to make sure questions are escalated to appropriate subject matter experts. They should be focused on the communities health.

Q: What is the biggest challenge ahead of you?

A: I’d say it is taking the platform to next level. As I mentioned before we recently added social share into the platform, but what else is out there? It will be a challenge making communities an easy go-to Web 2.0 tool. There are so many different ways we communicate day-to-day whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, e-mail or text messaging. It’s hard to make sure there’s one central place to go to. From a platform perspective, technology and communities will continue to evolve and it’s my job to monitor this space and help drive what will make communities a better platform and program, without losing sight of our goals.

 - Lauren Bittner, the author of this blog, is Senior Director of Client Services at Impact Interactions and has 10 years of experience with helping companies align their online community management efforts with their business goals.

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Management Efficiency – Using Dashboards for Executive Reporting



HI to all the readers of the Impact Interactions blog! My name is Robert Hu and I work at Impact Interactions as a manager of client services and I will be blogging about my experiences with how we manage social media and reporting.

We have been using tool called Xcelsius for almost 2 years now and it has worked wonders for all of our clients. No more 50 slide decks which no one ever read. With Xcelsius, we can now put all those charts, graphs, and other visuals that we had to repeat in the PowerPoint deck for each category into one simple visual which the user can filter to see what they are looking for. This not only saves so much time but also gives a more coherent story about what is going on with the social media strategy. Instead of putting 15 slides of the same line graph for each region, we can have just one graph the changes depending on which region the user selects.

Another benefit of a dashboard is that it can display data from multiple sources. As shown above from our dashboard, the data from traffic, behavior, value, and listening are all congregated into one simple view. This means that if you wanted to view the number of Twitter followers for this quarter you would click on the traffic tab. You can then go to the behavior tab and analyze how many of these followers are retweeting your content and finish by calculating the worth for all these tweets, followers, and retweets in the value tab. This process does not just apply to one social media tool, all of your social media offerings can be displayed in the dashboard which allows you a easy way to compare the results of each tool.

So you might be asking with all of these tools being displayed at once how do I compare the ones i want? The great thing about a dashboard is that you can filter out data that is important to you, therefore one dashboard can be distributed to multiple levels of management. The first screenshot shows a typical graph in a PowerPoint presentation, there are so many lines that it becomes confusing which competitor is doing better. But with the filters in a dashboard you can easily display only the competitors that you want to compare your company with which makes visualization of the data much easier.

Simplistic, versatile, and aesthetically pleasing, dashboards are the future of reporting and offer an enhanced way to view your data and make decisions from all your metrics.

Click here (flash required) and see for yourself on how a social media dashboard can look like and please let me know your thoughts on your own reporting experiences.

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Building Internal Wins – Avoiding the Social Media Dilemma

In an earlier post, I wrote about the most frequent comments and questions that I hear from online community and social media managers when I attend events. Even though social media is a very hot topic today, many managers believe they could do better work for their companies if they had stronger internal participation, additional budget, and a stronger tie to important business objectives.

In our experience, this requires proving the value of your efforts through small wins that captivate your audience. You want your internal executive audience to say “Wow!” not “That’s nice to know, thanks.” Which gets you their attention and their support?

To get the WOW factor into your presentations, you must move beyond the “what went up and what went down” type of analysis and instead focus on the key executive level achievements for your efforts. That requires understanding business goals for the social or community project. Once you identify what you want to accomplish from a business perspective, you can build the measurement strategy to report on the achievement of the goal.

In previous blog posts, we’ve covered our measurement methodology of Traffic, Behavior, and Value. Using these categories of metrics, we develop interactive dashboards which bring the methodology to life for our clients. The idea is to make the numbers more than a spreadsheet or powerpoint chart. The first way to do that is to flip the way you present data from the building to the value style to the leading with value presentation style. If you cannot capture the executive’s attention in about 30 seconds, you’ve missed your opportunity in our opinion. That’s what makes the dashboard concept so strong. It catches the attention of your audience and encourages them to click around and learn more.

To see this in action, click on our sample dashboard: Social Media Dashboard v.2.0 (FLASH required)

Now go ahead and play. Click through the tabs, check and uncheck boxes, go to the WHAT IF link and see how changing your offering mix impacts your objectives… all of this is based upon feedback from executives as to what they want to see. We suspect that most would stay on the first executive summary slide and maybe click on the value slide.

By demonstrating a quantitative approach to social media and commmunities which helps achieve business objectives, you break through the dilemma by proving the value of your efforts. You can annotate the results with qualitative data points, user generated content which backs up your results, and plans for future projects. In the end, to achieve internal success you have to prove the value and interactive dashboards are one of the best ways to do this… just ask our clients Cisco and NetApp. We’ve built very successful dashboards that help them demonstrate the success of their efforts in social media, blogging, and online communities.

If you want to learn more about social media measurement, dashboards, or proving the value of social media and communities, please contact us or leave a comment below.

 

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Moving Beyond Counts & Traffic – Social Media Measurement That Works

Lots of interesting research coming out on Social Media recently. We take note because the results and conclusions continue to demonstrate that measurement remains a high priority for executives, but what is delivered is not meeting their needs. Let’s take a look at some recent examples of companies surveyed about their social media efforts from a measurement point of view.

First a study from White Horse of 104 companies using social media shows us that when companies try to measure the success of their social media efforts, that very few (less than 15%) are able to get to an ROI for their work. They continue to use traffic and participation (we put that in our behavior metrics) to demonstrate success.

Here is another study which demonstrates a similar point, that companies are using social media traffic and behavior metrics as a measurement of success. This study completed by King Fish Media in June 2010 has great information; unfortunately, it reveals that while many companies say that they have a social media strategy in place they don’t understand how to measure its results.

Perhaps it is the way the research is presented versus the actual question asked, but when you read the measurements used for value they are not representing economic value in most cases. Rather, marketers and others measuring social media continue to focus on representing traffic as some sort of proxy for value. Worse, many still believe that the number of followers on Twitter or fans on Facebook is a valuable metric to use to demonstrate value. They couldn’t be more wrong…

Even the famed Guy Kawasaki is promoting an idea that the more followers the better during a TweetChat on MarketingProfs…but his perspective is the larger the audience from a sheer numbers perspective the better your results will be. In our experience, that is just not true. We see that the more QUALIFIED followers you have, the better your results MIGHT be.Why? Because the value of a follower is zero until they do something that brings value to the organization. If all they are doing is following and never taking action, can you assign a value to them? We think not. Have you analyzed your followers? How many are customers? How many are prospects? How many are competitors? (How many have followed your account to simply build their own counts through an auto-follow?)

So where does all this lead? Well, if you are attending theiStrategy meeting in Chicago on September 15-16, we’ll be there to address this issue. I’ll be presenting this topic on the morning of the 16th to the attendees.

I’ll demonstrate a stronger methodology for using a more integrated approach to your social media efforts which allows you to focus only on the metrics that really matter… those that lead to economic value for your organization.

For those of you who cannot attend, the presentation will be added to our social media resource center after the meeting ends. For those of you who are attending, please bring your questions!

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Gaming the System – Why Follower Counts Don’t Represent Influence

In December of 2009, I wrote about Misleading Indicators – Followers and Friends after seeing a tweet from Jeremiah Owyang of Altimeter Group. In that post, I explained why follower or friend counts do not represent a metric of influence nor should they be utilized as a relevant metric of importance. After several good comments as well as several emails to Impact Interactions giving me grief for disputing one of social media’s closely held beliefs, I decided to run an experiment on gaming the system.

My basic premise was that these counts are a false statistic which like placing value on “hits” in web metrics analysis leads you to focus on the wrong metric of your activities. Want to increase “hits”? Add more photos, widgets, content blocks, etc. to each of your pages. Each one adds a hit each time the page is opened. You can make the hit count be anything you want simply by adding more items to each page. In 2000, most people didn’t understand that aspect of the measurement so they used “hits” as a proxy for visits or even for influence of their content and site. We still have companies that talk about “hits” when they approach us about measurement. It’s a lasting issue that has thrown a lot of folks away from the important issues in measurement.

There have been several blog posts written about how to game Twitter to gain followers in order to look more important than your competition.  One of my absolute favorites is from Chris Cree of Success Creeations. His blog entry “How to Game Twitter to Add Thousands of Followers Every Day” should be mandatory reading for all social media marketing professionals. It spells out how you can game Twitter, but also why that is such a bad idea. So with that advice in hand, we set up a little experiment using free tools to game the system.

The Experiment Begins

Using a tool we won’t name here, we were able to almost double our number of followers for our @impactinteract twitter account in five days. Granted we were working from a small base, but the results show how easy it was to pull off. So let’s go to our experiment.

We started last week with 143 followers who found us either from our website, our efforts on LinkedIn, our speaking engagements, or organically from our tweets. We were following 43 members who were mostly our competitors. On Monday, I signed up for a free demo of one of the many tools which advertise that they can add followers quickly. By using the key words of “Social Media” and “Online Community” the tool returned over 700 accounts on Twitter that had potential for us as followers. These accounts had either tweeted the key words “Social Media” or “Online Community” in the past ten days. Sounds good so far right?

The tool then allowed us to follow the accounts in order to grow our followers by getting their auto-follower to reciprocate.  The demo of the tool we choose allowed us to generate up to 250 new followers before we would have to buy a license. So we started the process using the tool of following 250 accounts. It was fast and painless. In the fifteen minutes it took to follow these accounts, we were able to work on other activities. Once the 250 follows had been accomplished, we waited about a day and then unfollowed any account that didn’t auto-follow us. Over the next several days, we repeated the steps. Here is the table of our activities:

 

To keep everyone who autofollowed us aware of what we were doing, we tweeted a message several times during the experiment that stated:

We are testing a few of the tools that advertise that they can build your follower base for an upcoming blog #socialmedia #Twittermarketing. 

The idea was that if the new followers actually read our tweets they would also know what we were doing. That way they could unfollow us as quickly as they auto-followed us. Incredibly only 9 new followers over the course of the week unfollowed us. None sent a direct message about what we were doing. So in a little over a business week, we came close to doubling our followers. Total time including the time to download and set up the tool was about 2 hours total.

“Ah ha, the tool worked!” you might be saying to yourself. But did it really add followers for our corporate Twitter account who might spread our message and help us grow? Let’s take a look and find out if our tweets on social media and online community news and trends, as well as our company news is really relevant to our new found followers.

Of the 136 new followers, 14 (10%) sent the same auto-messages to me about making money on my tweets:

MAKING MONEY for your Tweets? I am. Making 20 daily on autopilot. Make money too – TODAY! http://bit.ly/xxxxxx Thanks for following

Another 9 (6.7%) sent an auto-message inviting us to join their multi-level marketing scheme or affiliate marketing network:

Thank your for following me at http://bit.ly/xxxxxx. We’re looking for affiliate marketers to help us. Do you know any?

Welcome to AffilBits! Want to know how to get thousands of targeted Twitter followers and earn a 50% affiliate commission at the same time?

Two follows were from famous and semi-famous people: Emma Watson of Harry Potter fame and a porn star.

12 (9%) new followers were from two unique members who used multiple accounts, but the same photo.

So out of the 136 new followers, we found 37 (27%) were not, nor would they ever be interested in Impact Interactions.

Influence scoring of our new followers shows the truth in the fallacy of follower counts. We used a scale of 1 to 5 to rank our new followers in regards to our ability to be influential with them or in their networks. A score of 1 means Impact Interactions is not potentially influential at all, 2 means probably not potentially influential, 3 means neither potentially influential nor not influential , 4 means somewhat potentially influential, and 5 means Impact Interaction is potentially influential. (And yes, we understand that this is not scientific because we are making the judgement. But how many people on Twitter really analyze their follower base on an individual level?)

Our influence score would be 1 with the group of 37 detailed above.

But what of the other 99?

We reviewed their tweets over the past ten days to see if these would really be good followers for us or not. What we found was 65 were simply folks who had retweeted someone else’s message about a social media topic. They were neither working for companies involved in social media or online communities nor were they particularly interested in the topics based upon analysis of their tweets. In fact several of the members were serial retweeters. We went back through several weeks of tweets and never found a single tweet that they created. So our influence score for these twitterers would be a 2.

There were 7 new followers who are in the search engine optimization industry, another 20 who are potential competitors or individual consultants trying to find work in the social media industry. The influence score for these followers would be 3.

The remaining seven new followers were blog publishers creating newsletter style blogs of others’ content around social media and online communities. They were linked to content aggregation sites rather than competitors. As these sites could potentially help us to influence their readers, we gave them an influence score of 4.

There were no members of our target audience of corporate social media or online community management staff amongst our new followers.

The weighted influence score for our new members was better than we expected at 2.02 (meaning Impact Interactions is probably not potentially influential to this new group of followers).

So, does our newly increased follower count mean that we’re more influential in the social media and online community world? No, it does not. You shouldn’t be impressed with the number of your Twitter followers either. With the set of tools available today, you too can gain thousands of new followers in days. But those followers won’t buy into your view of the world or your brand. In many cases those counts have been culled from the Twitter Borg, not from an audience that cares.

Organic growth of your audience builds an audience that actually is interested in your message or company. Use your content, flair for creativity, and on-target messaging to grow your followers. Include your Twitter account information (@ImpactInteract) in your email and other outgoing communications. Your influence will be stronger, even if your follower counts are smaller. Bigger isn’t always better, but don’t buy into the myth that more followers equals more influence. If we don’t put an end to this measurement idea, we will be having the same discussion in five years that we do with “hit counts” today, more than ten years after it first came up. 

To all of you who began following us during the experiment, thank you for taking part. If you wish to unfollow us, we’ll understand.

Mike Rowland, President

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Misleading Indicators – Followers & Friends

Saw this on my twitter feed yesterday:

What immediately struck me was the implied assumption that the number of followers you have infers a level of influence. In our opinion that’s a risky assumption to make especially if you are going to make a business decision using this as a key metric.

Here is what I sent back to Jeremiah via DM:

Let me translate my Twitterese….

The number of followers is not a direct measure of influence. Too many ‘experts’ in the social media field believe that it is and continue to sell this notion. I can quickly and easily increase the number of my followers using hashtags and keywords that are popular. Yet that doesn’t necessarily mean that I am a stronger influencer than I was with a lower number of followers.

Those folks with a larger number of followers should not necessarily receive special treatment from brands. The number of followers or friends a person has on Twitter or Facebook really has minimal bearing on their actual influence. (I know that’s a bit heretical, but I’ll get to the why in a little bit.)

• How many people have used the various advertised services to build their followers rather than organically growing their followers by posting relevant content and ideas?
• How many people send an invite/friend request/twitter follow to every email address they have expecting the ‘polite’ return linking/friending/following behavior?
• How many of the top people in terms of followers have a large brand behind them, providing follower building support? (Example, if you only tweet about HP or Oreo Cookies you’ll develop following due to the power of the brand not necessarily because you are a thought leader in the space.)

Because these numbers can be manipulated, they are not to be trusted as a direct metrics proxy for influence.

The example that I use in our social media workshops uses a metric that everyone thought was a useful metric way back when in 2000-2003: Hits. The logic at the time was that the more hits there were in a given period of time, the better the site was in meeting its goals. But alas, this metric could be easily manipulated. Want more hits? Add more banner ads, objects, photos, etc. to the page. Voila! Higher counts so more success, right? Well, not really.

Follower counts are the same as hit counts. Look at some of the top people on Twitter with 5,000+ followers. If they are focused on a single topic, they probably do have influence. But most people are not that focused, tweeting about business, sports teams, their family, current events, pets, politics, etc. Do these folks really have a sphere of influence that marketers can embrace and attempt to cultivate through the Twitter Celebrity? Hard to tell.

The idea of identifying influencers in an easy to understand and quick manner has been a search for the holy grail since online communities started becoming more popular in 2000. At Participate.com, we hired smart people to analyze metrics and activities to develop relevant networked connections that indicated a level of influence within the community.  We used the new techniques of social mapping as well as relationship metrics of interactions. The work was never easy and it never gave a true understanding of influence. What did give some insight into influence, was looking to see how others interacted with the individual, not how many individuals read his or her content.

For marketers, a better way to measure influence is to analyze the content being added on Twitter in conjunction with analyzing who the person’s followers are. This is a tough, manual project. But in the end, you’ll have a much better understanding of whether or not a particular individual with a high following is actually an influencer.

As much as we want one, sometimes there is no holy grail. Using simple metrics as proxies is not a substitute for the hard work that data analysis takes to prove a hypothesis. Don’t fall for the trap of taking the easy way out.

Have a different opinion? Please share your thoughts with us in the comments’ section.

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Social Media Metrics – Driving to Value

We’re members of the Online Community Research Network and recently received the latest report on Community Metrics derived from a survey of the membership. While we’re happy to see a lot of progress in the responses about tying measurement to business objectives, we continue to see confusion about measuring value. Over the past ten years, we’ve developed a methodology that can help online community and social media managers structure their reporting in order to focus on the value their efforts produce in terms of business objectives.

Looking  at the report’s question #12 (Were your community’s metrics created in support of your organization’s broader business goals or were they created independent of a corporate business?), the following responses were given:

• 47% Created to support existing business goals
• 31% Created independently but helping refine existing business goals
• 22% Neither of the above (summarized from three additional responses)

Looking at what metrics the respondents use to support or refine existing business goals provides insight into the confusion over what constitutes value in online community and social media efforts.

Question 19 asked “What are the three most important community key performance indicators (KPIs) in the reports you send to upper level management?” The answers are a startling contrast to the answers to Question 12:

1. Number of Page Views or Clicks
2. Number of Site Visits
3. Number of Unique Visits

Why are these responses startling? Because the metrics are traffic metrics not value metrics. These are base level metrics not KPI worthy metrics for upper level managers. (In fact, three of the top five metrics measured as detailed in an earlier question were traffic metrics too: Unique Visitors, Page Views, and Visitors. Only two were not: Registrations and Posts.)

What these two questions’ responses demonstrate is that the respondents are still struggling with determining value from their community work that truly builds into measurable business objectives.

When asked about ROI, 71% of respondents confused engagement and traffic metrics with value. Only 29% correctly identified a tangible value metric to use in measuring ROI.

To provide a little clarity in reporting metrics, let’s look at how Impact Interactions’ reporting methodology can help. First, our categories are structured as follows:

• Traffic - The basic building blocks that measure “How Many?”
• Behavior – The second level of metrics measuring conversion and engagement
• Value – The highest level of community metric where the activity has an economic or dollar value associated with it (This is what management really cares about!)

Some of the actual metrics that we use for clients are as follows:

1. Traffic - Unique Visits, Unique Visitors, Page Views, etc.
2. Behavior- Page Views/Unique Visit, Page Views/Unique Visitor, Active Members/Unique Visitors, New Registrations/New Unique Visitors, Total Registrations/Total Unique Visitors, Downloads/Registered Member, Content Added/Registered Member, Content Added/Unique Visitor, Downloads/Unique Visits, Full profiles completed, Referrals from Twitter/Facebook/YouTube, etc.
3. Value – Number of successful customer support resolutions in the community, Total Contact Sales Inquiries/ Total Unique Visitors (or Registered Members), Total Leads Qualified/Generated, Product Referrals, Positive Product Reviews as a % of Total Product Reviews, Direct Revenue Generated from Community Activities, Length of Sales Cycle for community member vs non-member, Average Purchase Size/Frequency for community member vs non-member, etc.

Take a look at those metrics again. The first two categories of Traffic and Behavior can usually be obtained using the platform’s tools (like Jive, Telligent, or Lithium) or through your web analytics’ tools (like Google Analytics, Omniture, or WebTrends). The Value metrics take a little more work. In fact, to really be able to perform a realistic ROI calculation, you will need to get help from outside the community/social media area of your organization.

To derive an ROI related to marketing objectives from a community, you’ll need to access your CRM system. For a support ROI, you’ll need to know the cost per interaction in complementary/competitive areas such as a call center. The standard tools won’t get you there, you’ll have to build relationships within your organization in order to really build a solid analysis that ties back to business objectives. An ROI model built on traffic will contain far too many holes to be useful.

We’ve been helping our clients with these issues and have developed a strong set of best practices that can help you succeed in your reporting. Please feel free to share your insights into this issue and ask questions about reporting and analyzing your community and social media efforts. We’re happy to answer them and help reduce the confusion.

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