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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Social Media: Whose Brand Is It? A Contrarian View

This week’s Fortune Magazine has a very interesting article in its career section titled “Building Your Brand (and keeping your job)” by Jost Hyatt. Are you a senior level marketer in an company that is moving quickly into social media? If so, this article should be on your critical reading list. Here’s why (excerpted from the article):

“When Monty joined Ford, he brought with him 3,500 Twitter followers; he now counts 41,000, conceding that many of those came with the big blue oval logo that now accompanies his tweets.”

“And he’s kept his Twitter handle as @scottmonty rather than adding the Ford brand. ‘I was Scott Monty before I came to Ford, and I’ll be Scott Monty after I leave Ford,’ he says.”

And he is absolutely correct… when he leaves Ford, he takes all the brand equity from his social media efforts with him. Well, maybe not all but certainly a lot.  This is not a criticism of Scott in any way, just a social media tactic that is going to back fire with a lot of companies as the economy gets better and people start changing companies again.

As we wrote in an earlier blog post, Walking Out the Door with the Twitter Password, organizations must have a plan for social media and turnover of employees. But we didn’t go in to the brand equity and ownership issue. So with the above article as an example, here are our thoughts.

Contrary to popular opinion that brands are owned by everyone in the world of social media and that organizations should give up control, we argue that this advice results in companies giving away valuable assets. The number one objective for using social media from a brand perspective should be to build the importance of the brand in the audience’s thoughts. That’s why marketers use advertising to build awareness, coupons to build trial use, and consistency in branding to build a relationship with consumers. In B2B terms, it’s still about awareness but the relationship factor becomes even more important. With all of the money spent by marketers to build their brands, enhance them, and promote them, why would they let the value slip away as someone walks out the door for a new position? But with the social media tactics promoted and utilized by so many, this is exactly what companies are doing.

“People forget that they are always representing their companies… If you send a tweet that says ‘My Boss sucks,’ you have to be aware of what could happen.” – Lucia Erwin, fomrerly H-P’s sr. director of strategic workforce planning

And here’s an example of how personal accounts acting as corporate accounts can back fire from the article:

“Amy D. was a social-networking expert at a marketing firm. She was just ‘letting out some frustration’ last year when she issued a tweet noting the irony that she was editing a presentation about social media for her boss who didn’t use it. She got fired shortly thereafter for violating a new communications policy.”

(Amy probably wasn’t a real social networking expert because that was such a rookie mistake. But that is another story about our industry all together…)

So what is a company to do? Well, for one rethink this tactic. Think about the number of cases where an employee has tweeted, added to their wall, or commented on a blog inappropriately or worse in a way critical of the brand. It’s easy to write these off as isolated instances, but it happens a lot. That’s why companies institute social media policies for their organizaiton’s employees to follow. It gives them recourse and a limited amount of protection should they fire someone (as also mentioned in the article above).

A better tactic is to use the brand as the leader, not an individual. The account(s) are owned by the company, not the individual. The passwords are the property of the company. If the individual leaves, the account remains in tact but with a new author. Does the author get some credit? Sure, in the profile section of the company brand’s account. For example, the account for your product could be titled “AcmeWidgets” with a profile that states “AcmeWidgets provides product information and company communications. Our account is written and managed by JoAnn Smith, an Acme employee with six years of experience in the Widget Industry.” (See our Twitter account profile as an example: @ImpactInteract.)

That way, the focus of your company’s social media efforts remains on the brand not on the personality of the employee. It also gives credit to your employee, but allows your company to switch out the author at any time without losing your audience. 

While some ‘gurus’ and social media ‘experts’ will argue about transparency or being authentic here, this tactic is transparent/authentic, it gives your company a social media voice, and it allows for a measure of protection of your most valuable asset…. your brand.

Sometimes, it pays to follow a contrarian idea and go against the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ especially if it involves maintaining your brand’s position and standing in an ever growing social world.

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Global View – The World Cup & Social Media

                                                           

 

 

Image Courtesy of Adidas.com

Over the past several weeks, we’ve been focused on the World Cup as has most of the world. But as we’ve been drawn into the fever, the controversies (Goal – England!), and the off-beat (Miniskirt scandal), we’ve also been working on several large global projects for our clients around the world. And just as you watch for the details of how your team won or lost, our clients have been watching to see how they will win or lose. Because, in global social media and online communities your team can’t take a dive to stop the action or disrupt the play. Instead you must be focused on the details and the flow of your effort.

By details, we mean not just the players but their skills. In the social media world that means understanding that Twitter in Japan is big and growing, but it is pretty much ignored in Italy. So in Japan, you want Twitter on your team. In Italy, we’ll let’s just say that we’d put Twitter on the bench for at least the first half. Facebook in Germany is a big scoring striker for the B2C focused company, but in B2B it’s a ball boy. While over in Japan, Facebook wouldn’t make the team. So as you look to expand globally, research your offerings in terms of your audience. It will help a lot in terms of the results you’ll achieve (or miss)… each player has a role in the game and on the team. Don’t offer up each player as a starter when some should be on the bench.

For online communities, the make up of your team is just as vital. But so is your coach who is focusing on the details of the game’s strategy & tactics while also being the one keeping their eye on the details. For example, your coach should understand that even though many platforms are able to work in a double byte language like Japanese, the audience may want both Japanese and English titles when using your community. Each of those little buttons that perform a task on the site must also be in the local language, yet often they remain in English. The devil is in the details…

We’re excited by the recent interest in globalization of social media and online communities by our clients and prospects. But just as regionalism really isn’t dead in the U.S., differences in cultures are far greater than the differences in languages alone. Don’t expect that the offering you provide in English will translate across to your next targeted area. Instead, collaborate with your audience to define their needs and select the tools that will help them the most.

Afterall, fans follow teams where there are players they can relate to and admire, not teams that continually frustrate them…

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B2B Social Media Best Practices: SAP Best Performance for Partners Program

Over the past several months, we’ve been helping SAP’s Partner Enablement team to understand how to use social media to further their goals of increasing partner sales and adding new partners to sell SAP software to the small and midsize enterprise (SME) market. Because there is a lot of confusion over using social media in a B2B setting, we’ve built a training methodology which takes the best practices from our ten years of experience in B2B social media and community work to simplify and help SAP’s partners.

The methodology is built around a very simple, yet powerful concept: Restaurant menus. Our training workshops provide teams with the questions that they must answer to successfully utilize social media. The goal is to clearly identify your strategy and objectives, then build a menu of tactics to support your effort.

So, are you a Pizzeria or a Fine Dining restaurant? Do you have a limited menu or an expansive menu with ever changing offerings (think of daily specials)? Does your audience have the time for a five course meal or do they want take out? Do you have multiple chefs or is there one person making your pizza?

By answering these and other questions, B2B teams begin to gain clarity in their objectives, audience, content strategy, and measurement requirements. Once we complete this session, we move into the tactical way to utilize social media in order to build out the menu of offerings.

Not all tactics are appropriate, nor does B2C social media strategy always deliver the intended results. By understanding how B2B social media tactics differ from B2C and work together to deliver results, our client SAP has generated significant results. In terms of helping partners succeed in a tough economy, it’s Best Performance for Partners social media program delivers training and information efficiently to help each partner organization succeed in meeting its revenue and lead generation objectives. For SAP, the partners who are participating are learning better ways of marketing and selling which benefits SAP directly in the form of revenue achievement.

For SAP, the Best Performance Challenge is an innovative way to build its partner channel competency each year. The Best Performance Circle, composed of the top partner organizations in EMEA and India, reinforces SAP’s commitment to its partners by using an online community to strengthen its relationship with a key part of its sales ecosystem.

The video below by Raimund Mollenhauer, Head of Enablement & Talent Net for SAP Partners, SME EMEA & Global describes how SAP is using Impact Interactions’ methodology today to deliver results:

The innovation continues at SAP with future roll-outs of additional Best Performance initiatives. Their use of social media not only speeds the adoption of these initiatives, but also delivers value to the partner channel in a cost effective manner.

To learn more about B2B social media best practices, our workshops, or social media for channel management, please contact us or ask a question here on this blog.

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B2B Social Media – Moving Beyond the Hype

Several of our team members were in London for the annual Internet World Exhibition held at Earls Court between April 27th and April 29th. As one of the few exhibitors and speakers in the B2B Social Media Industry at the show, we noticed a lot of confusion about using social media and what social media could do for a B2B focused organization.

For example, we noticed a large number of email vendors selling the idea that email is social media (it’s not). The idea of renting a list of unknown people to send your message to was presented as social media (it’s not). Lastly, there is so much confusion over using social media applications like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn for business that we spent much of our time helping people learn the basics of the applications and why they might want to consider using them.

But just as important to us, there were many people who were disappointed using social media as they didn’t get the results they wanted or thought that they would. Why? Because in most cases, their companies were using B2C techniques to engage with the B2B audience for their services. Many were following the common theme of retweeting others, constantly updating their Facebook pages with product information, building a network of as many followers as possible, and joining as many groups as they could on LinkedIn. And most of it was a gigantic waste of time.

At Internet World, I presented a short case for why B2B Social Media is very different from B2C. The presentation covered the idea that most people are focused on the tactics at the expense of their strategy by following the common wisdom of social media experts and gurus who only understand B2C marketing. B2C is concerned with building awareness, then trial. That’s why couponing is so effective for B2C. B2B is concerned with building relationships. It’s harder and takes much more time than B2C social media tactics. But in the end, it leads to tremendous value when executed properly.

You can download the presentation’s slides here: B2B Social Media – What Works 2010. The slides are helpful when viewing the actual presentation below: (Quick Note, the edited video below is courtesy of Seminar Streams, so you’ll have to register or log in to see the video. Or enter our username Impact and our password impact. The video will play right away and you won’t have to search for it.)

 

 

 

If you’d like to learn more about using B2B Social Media for lead generation, customer support, training, channel or partner management, or another specific purpose, please contact us.

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Determining Online Community ROI (Part 1: Community-Side Metrics)

by Matthew Lees

In recent months my research, writing, and client work has (happily) focused on one of the hottest topics in social media…calculating ROI. For a variety of reasons, determining quantifiable ROI of social media programs and online community initiatives presents a variety of challenges. There’s nothing new in this statement; people have been trying for years to make it easier to figure this out. But ROI keeps fighting back. It’s getting to the point, though, where business executives will be expecting a more quantified understanding of the impact customer communities, for example, are having on the bottom line. Knowing that it’s “the right thing to do” from a customer-centric perspective isn’t going to cut it much longer.

One of the challenges is the fact that some (or even most) of the information needed to measure ROI isn’t in a convenient location.

Last year in a post called “B2B Communities – What Works,” Mike Rowland discussed a handful of essential best practices for B2B communities. He wrote: “You can measure the ROI for B2B communities, but you cannot get there by using only community software metrics and/or web analytics packages like Omniture or Google Analytics. None of these provide true value metrics that have an economic value associated with them. To get to ROI, you must build relationships within your organization so you can obtain real data on customers, leads, ecommerce transactions, etc.”

Right on, Mike. To get at community ROI (whether for B2B, B2C, or any other type of community), you’ve got to track down data from several sources – particularly from sources that you probably don’t have direct control over or access to – which takes building relationships, making allies, and a bit of legwork.

Community-Side Metrics
The relatively straightforward part of the legwork compiling the data you do have direct access to. This is the information you can get from log files, your community platform database (often through an analytics dashboard), and, if you use one, a third-party analytics package (such as Google Analytics or Omniture). The types of things available from these community-side sources include:

•    Traffic and Usage. Pages served, page views, visits (and unique visits), time on site, etc.
•    Membership. Total members, new members, active members, reputation and ranks, etc.
•    Activity. Posts, comments, ideas, invitations, votes, ratings, subscriptions/notifications, downloads, views (e.g., of video clips), time between posts, etc.
•    Search. Both quantity of searches and specific search terms (such as top 20 search terms)
•    Other. Moderation (e.g., moderator touches), referrer pages, etc.

Ideally you’ll be able to break down this data based on important parameters, such as time and location within the community. For example, you’ll probably want to look at the all-time number of members, as well as the number of members over a given time period (typically week-over-week or month-over-month). And you may want to look not only at total pages served within the community, but also at pages served within particular areas (such as forums, blogs, idea sites, and so on).

Community-side metrics can be very useful, but, as Mike wrote, they don’t illustrate economic value. At least, not in and of themselves. They’re certainly useful in terms of knowing whether or not the community is healthy (three consecutive months of decreasing page views, for example, might tell you that something is wrong), but they only get you part of the way toward determining ROI.

Up next…building relationships and doing the legwork to identify the business-side metrics that get you the rest of the way there.

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What Have You Done For Your Community Lately?

If I could sum up the advice I gather from books and seminars about networking and building business relationships, whether it takes place on a social media site like “LinkedIn” or a face-to-face meeting, it would be this: “Ask not what your network can do for you, ask what you can do for your network.”

Now take that sentence and substitute the word “online community” for “network”. It still works. The members of a community are connecting to help each other professionally in some way. And they are certainly helping the sponsor of the community drive a business objective. Part of managing a community, just as in managing a network, is focusing on furthering the interests of the people you’re interacting with, rather on focusing solely on how they can help you.

I was reminded of this philosophy when I read “Seven Steps to Creating a B2B Community on Twitter.”  The article relays best practices for creating a relationship with your followers that is more about giving than taking to help build a thriving community.

What examples do you have of ways  you have created a win-win situation for your community members?

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Blogging For Business – B2B Best Practices

Many of our clients and visitors to our site have questions about blogging in the B2B marketing world. We believe that blogging is a very good solution for starting your interactive journey of engagement with your audience. But we also understand that there needs to be a focus on creating compelling content that helps your audience become informed about your products and service, demonstrate thought leadership, or meet other needs of your readers.

Too often we see a blog that is full of press releases from marcom teams that provides minimal value to the reader. What we mean by compelling content is a blog entry that provides unique viewpoints from executives about industry trends, macro-economic issues which impact the industry, or industry developments. That does not mean static, boring paragraphs on dry topics. Rather it means providing your analysis on why this information is important for your audience. We know from our work with SAP that prospective buyers of B2B products and solutions are looking for executive viewpoints to understand where the company is going and to see if they agree with the direction. This is especially true for those companies preparing to buy a product which represents a significant change to their business operations.

But does that mean that your team must write a long 1,000 word blog entry each time? Some teams think so, and that provides a disincentive for internal members to contribute. As a team charged with blogging for your organization, the best way that you can build internal contributions is to train potential bloggers that entries should take multiple forms ranging from the short paragraph and link to an article to the summary of a key issue that may take several paragraphs to describe properly.

As long as your writers are providing a point of view on the content, the length doesn’t matter. A few sentences detailing why an article link provided is valuable often is more widely read than the long entry. Remember, B2B readers often have less time than B2C readers who are reading for enjoyment. Because of this dynamic, a short and to the point style is often preferable.

In our day long workshops to train organizations on the best practices of social media, we use a menu analogy to help everyone understand that social media works best when there are multiple courses and types used. We teach teams about using cocktails, appetizers, entres, and desserts to tantalize, teach, and engage with their audiences. As part of the workshops, we build recipe cards for our teams. Our blog recipe card is shown below:

This recipe card covers multiple ideas needed to consider when blogging. But overall, the idea is that a consistent well written blog can be very useful for both the organization and its target audience.  Content must be of interest, well written, and invite comments. Once comments are made, your organization must engage even if the comment disagrees with your idea or premise. Organizations that will not respond to user comments should not blog. Those that do engage will receive the benefits of social media engagement, leaving those who do not far behind.

Do you have questions about what to blog? Here is our rule of thumb for B2B blog content (it’s based upon our metrics analysis of client blogs):

1. 50% thought leadership
2. 20% analysis & insight
3. 15% promotional (events)
4. 15% announcements (product related)

Want to engage your audience? Try these best practices we and others have developed

1. Write in a personal voice, have an opinion or point of view
2. Blog content should have an element of uniqueness
3. Offer insight and analysis to events and/or trends
4. Add graphics, videos, charts, etc. Anything that can offer more connection and activity for the viewer
5. Update your blog using a calendar schedule so that it doesn’t become stale
6. Use your personal experiences to enrich your blog, people can easily tell if you are just posting press releases
7. Be conservative with the amount of links to your site or products
8. Talk about what’s on your mind, do not just copy and paste press releases
9. Do not make the blog into a sales brochure, diversify your content
10. Do not replicate content on the blog that you can find on your main site
11. Do not ignore your readers, if you see that there are comments, answer them and create a two way dialogue

Remember that you will have many more readers than those who will engage and comment. Help your audience. Think of their needs, then write the stimulating content in a concise manner that will meet those needs. Ready to blog? We hope so and look forward to hearing your thoughts.

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Who Needs It? Dealing with Unwanted Content and Conversations in Your Online Community

by Matthew Lees

Every day seems to bring increased buy-in and understanding of how social media and online communities can positively impact organizations. But there’s still pushback around certain things. For example, community platform vendors, consulting firms, and agencies still regularly hear concerns such as “What if someone uses profanity?” and “What if they say bad things about us?”

Most of the content in your community – and throughout the social Web, too – is stuff you want. These are the questions and answers your community members share with each other and with you. They’re their problems and solutions, their interesting and relevant comments (even their uninteresting and relevant comments), their ideas, wish lists, and perspectives.

But there will also be things that you really don’t want, the content and conversations that you and the community could surely do without.

These things should make up a small percentage of the overall content, but it’s all but impossible to avoid them completely. (You’ll typically find a smaller percentage of unwanted posts in B2B communities than in B2C communities, and you’ll usually see a smaller percentage of such things in support-related communities than in affinity and engagement communities.)

Thanks But No Thanks
To be more specific, the unwanted stuff is posts and content that contain…

1. Inappropriate Language or Content. No surprise here…these are comments, images, or videos of a sexual, violent, abusive, or otherwise inappropriate nature. Note that this is about more than the use of foul language. There are a lot of mean and nasty things that can be said with perfectly acceptable words.
2. Advertising or Spam. Some advertising may be fine in your community. Often, though, it’s not. And I can’t think of a situation in which any community would want spam. (Is there a Spam community? If so, that would prove me wrong.)
3. Incorrect Information. You can’t fully control the quality of user-generated answers, solutions, and comments. Members will, on occasion, post information that’s incorrect. Usually it’s unintentional, but it can cause confusion or worse. Blatantly incorrect info is relatively easily fixable; gray areas can lead to disagreement, dissent, and (hopefully) healthy discussion.
4. Sensitive or Confidential Information. Some customers often have access to inside information, as do your colleagues, of course. If people aren’t careful, or if there’s miscommunication on when and where certain information can be shared, they can inadvertently say things they shouldn’t. This doesn’t happen often, but the cat does sometimes get out of the bag.
5. Off-Topic Comments. Such posts may be benign, but they’re either entirely irrelevant or relevant to another place in the community.

There are also a few types of posts that some may see as unwanted. But community managers and moderators worth their salt see these as acceptable, if not desirable (at least in low volume), since they demonstrate transparency and authenticity, and give community members opportunities to chime in on your behalf. These are post that…

•    Say Negative Things about Your Organization, Brand, Products, Services, etc.
•    Say Positive Things about the Competition

Be Prepared
So how do you deal with all these situations? Best is to have your ducks in a row beforehand. Here are some suggestions:

•    Have a good moderation plan, and a great community manager and moderation team. When dealing with unwanted content and conversations, moderators should be observant, understanding, firm, and fair. And know what you’ll do when you get each type of unwanted post.
•    Create appropriate community policies and guidelines, not only for community members, but for subject-matter experts and other internal stakeholders and participants.
•    Make friends with colleagues throughout your organization. It’s worthwhile, if not essential, to check in with the folks in legal, corporate communications, and pretty much all other business units. They can help with the Action Plan items that pertain to them, and help deal with unexpected things should they arise.
•    Have a library of stock replies at your disposal. This will help you respond to issues quickly.
•    Leverage the tools in your community platform. The moderation tools and accompanying workflow are important here, of course. I’m a big fan of content filters (for catching obscenities and other text strings) that trigger email notifications. And the ability to enable or disable anonymous posts can be helpful, as well, since people tend to take more liberties when they can participate anonymously.
•    Be aware. Be very aware. Technology won’t catch everything. There’s no substitute for paying attention.

Most online community best practices deal with how to engage with community members and get more of the good stuff. Knowing how to minimize and deal with the unwanted stuff is important, too.

And the best way to assuage execs’ concerns is to say “Yes, there will be some amount of unwanted and inappropriate content and conversations in the community. We can’t avoid that. But here’s how we’ll be handling them when they do arise…”

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Will Employee Communities and Customer Communities Converge? (Part 4)

by Matthew Lees

In this fourth and final post on the potential for convergence between Internal and External communities – see Post #1 to start at the beginning – I want to touch on the individuals who are charged with building and managing communities, whether communities of employees or communities of customers.

The Practitioner Perspective
We’re still in the very early days of social software and online communities. Practitioners are the ones at the forefront of this field, which is at the interaction of sociology, technology, and business. And they’re breaking ground daily.

They’re the knowledge management strategists who think about ways of getting colleagues to collaborate more openly; they’re the HR professionals who want to retain top talent by ensuring all voices are not only heard, but also help shape what’s important within the organization; they’re the community managers and moderators who work to get customers to support and learn from each other; they’re the marketers monitoring brand value and customer sentiment across the social Web; and they’re the marketers, developers and researchers who look to engage with customers (and prospective customers) and glean insights in order to innovate and improve.

What they’re not, though, is omniscient. Because social practitioners are working in such a new space, success is a moving target. They don’t know – they can’t know – what things will be like in six months, in a year, or in five years. The guidelines, benchmarks, and best practices are largely still being created every day. Sure, some organizations and vendors are ahead of others, and there’s a lot that (happily) is known and at least somewhat agreed upon, but compared to more traditional disciplines, there are few, if any, codified bodies of knowledge.

Pulled in Multiple Directions
What this means is that it’s tough enough being a social media practitioner in the first place, let alone trying to work in multiple domains, specifically internal and external. Some of the tools and techniques involved in building, managing, and getting the most out of a community apply to both internal and external communities…but many don’t. And, as Post 2 touched on, the business goals are very different.

Last month I wrote about a practitioner in a marketing communications group whose B2B online customer community initiative was sidetracked into becoming an internal collaboration-based community. She was caught in a tug of war between the internally focused IT team and the outward-looking marketing group, with execs on both sides knowing they needed her social media expertise, but not realizing how vastly different their business goals were.

And she’s not the only one in this predicament.

The Downside of Employee Community and Customer Community Convergence
For practitioners, the downside of such convergence is the potential for being pulled unwillingly and/or unexpectedly into initiatives that you’re unprepared for, unsuited for, or uninterested in. It’s nice to ride the excitement of the social media wave, and to be appreciated and in demand for one’s expertise. But the excitement can easily turn to frustration. Here are some things to keep in mind:

•    Bring it back to business goals and business use cases. You may need to hammer on this over and over. It’s a big red flag if business sponsors are unclear on the business goals, or not in agreement with each other.
•    Make sure the technology platforms under consideration fit these use cases. Only a handful claim to support both internal and external communities, and they don’t necessarily do both things equally well.
•    Stay true to yourself. Boy, does that sound corny, but I’ve seen more than a few people take on something they knew they were ill-suited for, uninterested in, and/or knew things wouldn’t end well. It’s a good thing — really, an essential thing — to challenge yourself by going outside your comfort zone, but do this with your eyes open. And if you know it’s not right, try not to go there.

The Road Ahead
While I fully resonate with the holy-grail concept of having a single ecosystem in which both employees and customers participate, the realities of organizational behavior, social dynamics, and technology limitations will preclude this from happening on any sizable scale. Some organizations will continue to move in this direction, and some vendors will support them, but for the most part, inside will remain inside, and outside will remain outside.

The good news, though, is that while this wall will continue to stand, it will continue to become more permeable, with (1) customers and others outside the organization (e.g., customer advisory groups) being able to come in behind the firewall as warranted, and (2) employees being able to participate in more ways in customer communities.

For social media practitioners and community managers, who by nature and by practice place a great deal of stock in the value that customers can provide, this can be a good place to be.

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