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.

Back to the blog

Pro-Active Social Media: Taking Audience Engagement to the Next Level

While doing some research on how companies are incorporating social media into their communications, I came across two intriguing articles that really got me thinking about how far the social media industry could go and whether it should go there. The first article, When Customer Service is a Twitter Response, was actually written in response to the Hotels Magazine article, A Day in the Life of the Digitized Hotel(registration required to read). The Hotels Magazine article was a proposed day of interaction between a hotel and their guest completely driven by social media. First, the guest gets off the plane and complains on Twitter that the taxi line is long to which to hotel quickly responds asking if they would like the hotel to contact a car service for them. In a second exchange, the guest is sent a message on their hotel provided iPad recommending a massage because the guest had mentioned in a tweet that they were considering having one after a long day. Finally, when the guest returns home and mentions the hotel in their tweet the hotel again responds this time thanking the guest and giving them a code for a complimentary upgrade on their next stay.

The idea of taking social media to this level was fascinating even though the “big brother” aspect was admittedly a little creepy. The comments I read in the Economist article were mostly against this kind of heavy social media driven interaction. Many of the comments lamented the loss of human interaction in our society while others were somewhat unsettled by the thought of companies knowing that much about where they were and what they were doing. One commenter actually recounted how he stayed at a hotel only to find out that the hotel (and many others) had actually removed the in-room phones because they assumed that all their guests had cell phones and it was just costing them money to keep them in the rooms.

Taking it to the extreme that the fictional hotel did does smack of something from Minority Report but I’m still left asking myself why shouldn’t companies engage their audience (or event heir business partners) in this way just on a smaller scale? I don’t know that I lament the use of social media by companies to pro-actively engage their customers. If my options for communication are calling a company and being put on hold for an undetermined amount of time or making a request online which can instantly be dealt with, I know which one I’m picking.

I recently helped put together a presentation on examples of companies successfully implementing social media into their business plan. One of the stand outs was TATA Docomo, a telecom provider in India. Rather than operating like most corporations who expect the masses to come to them, TATA Docomo realized that the only way they were going to make inroads in the tough Indian telecom market was to go to the people. They now skillfully leverage both Twitter and Facebook as their main means of communicating with their customers for both customer service issues as well as informing them of new offerings. This has lead to huge customer loyalty despite the lack of a “physical” connection.

The generations that are coming of age now are doing it in a time of amazing digital advancements. I’m old enough to remember the days before the internet was a daily part of life but young enough to be in the generation of adults who are keen to absorb any new digital gadget that comes onto the market. Businesses need to realize this fact and capitalize on it. Don’t be afraid of using social media for these kinds of communications. Companies that start a Facebook page only to tell all the people who ask for help that they need to contact the customer service number are going to be sorely disappointed by their “community” building efforts. That’s because they aren’t engaging people in the places where they actually want to be engaged. The example of TATA Docomo is one that companies should look to as the way forward. TATA has engaged their communities consistently on the formats they know are the most popular. What did it get them? It took them from the bottom of the Indian telecom barrel to the top of the mountain. They were the 9th telecom company to enter the Indian market and faced competitors who had been there for years but in a very short time they were the top. Why? It worked because they embraced what social media could do for them.

Ignoring the changing communication landscape is the equivalent of sticking your head in the sand. The world is changing around us, why not change with it? Our two part blog series on this very topic titled Executive Use of Social Media discusses the importance of this changing landscape and highlights the success several major companies have had in implementing social media into their business operations. Part One is already posted so be sure to check back and watch Part Two.

Back to the blog

Branded Communities Are Doomed? Not so fast.

By: Miranda Young, September 30, 2011

Engaging your audience isn’t always an easy task and in times like these, when everything has to be monetized, it’s easy to get scared off by the seeming inability to truly measure the value of your online community. To some, online communities really don’t earn their keep or are really only there to preach to the already existing choir of users.  In our experience, this couldn’t be further from the truth.  Online communities can be both the lifeblood of an organization as well as a platform to attract those ever elusive new users/consumers. We’ve helped several major organizations grow their online communities into vital repositories of information, communication, and conversation.  Not only that, we’ve seen these communities facilitate huge ROIs for their brand.

Richard Millington, founder of the UK based Fever Bee Community Consultancy, recently wrote an article titled “Why Branded Online Communities Are Doomed.”  Some of what he wrote has merit, but, in our view, a lot of it doesn’t because we’ve personally seen the opposite happen.

Communities CAN be an important source of revenue

“At the moment, most branded community efforts fail. Few attract more than a handful of active participants. Even those that succeed, barely deliver the ROI they promised.” -  Richard Millington

While this may be true of some online communities, blanket statements about their ability to both attract active participants and deliver the ROI they promised is patently false. We helped NetApp build their online community which has gone on to produce over half a billion (yes, billion) dollars in partner owned sales revenue. Cisco has seen a ROI of over 100% from their online community.  And there are other companies all over the country and around the globe that are seeing direct monetary benefits come out of their online communities.  Whether it’s through direct sales coming out of those communities or greater brand awareness, over all, B2B and B2C communities can and do work.

Communities aren’t just for loyal customers

“If you’re trying to reach new audiences, a community is the wrong choice. Why would people join a community for a product/service they don’t buy?” - Richard Millington

Again, this is not what we’ve experienced in our many years of helping companies build out their online communities.  If you’re trying to reach a new audience communities can be one of the BEST places to turn to.  When reading that question, we ask the question back “Why would someone buy a product that they haven’t asked other people, people who are already users, about.”  Communities are where they can get their questions answered and it’s someplace where, once they do become a user, they can return to.  They know the community will be there to help them and having a robust, active community there for your prospective customers is a benefit rather than a waste as Mr. Millington would have you believe.  Not only that, often times these communities help stave off customer support calls by answering questions within the community.  This, in turn, saves the company money and also builds quality relationships among new and loyal users.  Those new users will look to the community as a source of information and turn into loyal users resulting in even more revenue as they continue to buy more products and support your brand through word of mouth advertising.

Size matters but it can’t be one size fits all

“Communities don’t need a big launch, they need a small launch…They need very high levels of personal contact. They need to be directly invited. Most importantly, they need to be prompted for the first few weeks to participate in discussions.” -   Richard Millington

Yes and no. Mr. Millington is right that companies need to focus on nurturing their communities and even help guide the conversations sometimes, but that doesn’t mean that the community as a whole can’t be big at launch.  Directly inviting members isn’t going to get you far when it comes to building your community. We have found that only 3-5% of all invited users or users who find the community feature will go deeper than one page into the new community.  Even then, only 15-20% of those will actually stay long enough to come to their own opinion about what you’re offering and only a few of those will actually post anything. We prefer to advise our clients to look across their entire audience for places where users share interests and create a larger group of members and visitors that can interact with the community from that.  The size of the “starter” community should be based upon a percentage of your entire audience not a finite number of 50-100 as Mr. Millington suggests.

Communities are here to stay

“We need to understand that communities take time, but it’s an investment which pays off many times over.” -  Richard Millington

Now this is something we can all agree on. Communities take time but, like Mr. Millington says, it’s an investment which will pay off in the end.  Done right, online communities can be the keystone of your overall communication plan. We’ve seen them be successful time and time again. Online communities are far from doomed.  We’ve seen quite the opposite.  They can and do have measureable monetary and social effects on both new and loyal users and they are a powerful tool in your arsenal of social media tactics.

Back to the blog

Cisco Service Provider Community Makes Business Personal

We invite you to read and learn from Impact Interactions’ interview with Deborah  Strickland, Manager, Social  Media  and Digital Marketing for Cisco Systems. Deborah manages the Cisco Servicer Provider Community for executives in the mobility industry, as well as many other social media projects. Listen to Deborah discuss the challenges of creating a collaborative online environment for a group and a level of professionals who not only compete, but also typically avoid sharing information. Join us and allow Deborah’s innovative strategies for engaging her target audience and generating fresh, compelling content to pack some punch to your online strategy.

1) Describe your role at Cisco:

I manage a team of other social media strategists and web developers who work across mobility, video, routing and switching, and data center products. We cover events, product and solutions announcements. In January we worked on the Videoscape announcement at CES, the Consumer Electronic Show, and we recently promoted an online TelePresence concert with the singer Jewel. This was in collaboration with AT&T and Marriott.  We also completed our first series of tweet chats for our mobile and video campaigns.

2) Describe the Cisco Service Provider Community and your business goals.

The community started in June 2009 as part of an experiment to increase our global influence. We wanted an open platform where we could discuss the technical and business details of the challenges global operators have in regard to upgrading, managing and identifying revenue opportunities for their networks.  It was not intended to be a forum for product or technical support issues; there are plenty of those already.

A secondary goal is to give our internal subject matter experts (such as solution managers, product engineers, and marketing managers) an opportunity to participate in a public arena where they can showcase their expertise and make themselves available for ongoing conversations. The community is a way to get our experts’ names out there where they can write in a more natural format (as opposed to the highly edited format of a white paper), and put a personal face on our content. Plus it gives them a taste of social media and eases them into the idea of being conversational.

3) Give us an example of this “personal touch” and some of the benefits and challenges of using it.

In one instance, a colleague of mine was meeting mobile operators in Asia to explore the monetization of 3G and 4G networks. I proposed to her that she do something a little different than the usual post-event summary.  Although she wasn’t able to name specific customers, we turned her business trip into a series of travel stories. She did a great job of giving a daily wrap-up recorded from her hotel room. She included local photos and videos of where she happened to be, the food she was eating, and a summary of her customer conversations. This shows that we actually go out and talk to people. We’re not just sitting here in our cubes 3,000 miles away from the action. In this case it was the first time this person did a blog, let alone a video blog and she was a natural. It showed other people on the team how they could use storytelling to get their point across sans the Power Point deck.

People are also more apt to want to reply back to blogs, discussions and other community content if the content is not dry. Our content is written in such a way that you know the person who’s talking. It’s just like you met them at a dinner party.

Some of the content on business sites is really dry. We’re changing how people communicate. The challenge is that the writing on many corporate websites is very reviewed and edited.  People who are used to writing in that style find it hard to relax and be conversational. There can be a sense of fear of participating in social media in a corporate environment. Yes you have your own voice and are telling a story, but you’re also very aware of the approved messaging, competitor commentary, and the fact that you can’t take back what you said. Once it’s out there, it’s there forever.

4) How do you prove the value of your content to your executive team?

One example I use is the comparison of how many views a white paper on Cisco.com will get as compared to how many views that same content gets if we repurpose it in creative ways.  A lot of money is spent on developing white papers, but if they aren’t getting viewed, you’ve wasted time and money. There could be many reasons why a piece of collateral isn’t getting consumed so part of the challenge is to experiment and repurpose that same data into different formats that are easier to digest and share.

I identified one particular white paper that wasn’t getting the views we had hoped, but we knew would be of greater interest.  When we divided the white paper into a series of  blog posts, reworded it slightly , added some photos, and dispersed questions throughout the blog,  we received more than 1,200 views (as opposed to 43 when it was posted on cisco.com)

5) What’s the lesson to be learned here?

You don’t have to start from scratch. There is content in your organization that is valuable, but is not getting used or read. Sometimes content on Cisco.com may be hard to find because the site is so big. If you see content on your corporate site has value, but you are disappointed in its usage you can correct it and repurpose it in many ways. You can’t just post it and forget it, and expect people to come to you and hope they find this great piece you wrote. Bite-size pieces are so much easier and inviting for people to consume. You need to rethink how content is created and distributed. You can always provide a link to the detailed document, but quick summaries of the main points are what most people want to find when they only have a few minutes  to get their questions answered.

6) How does the use of 3^rd party applications like Ulitzer.com, a content aggregator which allows articles on the community to be picked up by search engines and RSS feeds, factor into what you’re trying to achieve?

I believe it’s more important that your content get consumed and that people can find it easily than it is to force the audience to come to us to read it. Why spend time creating content that no one can find? It’s about presenting the information the way your audience likes it. We go where the audience is and reference back to the community. Content aggregator systems are sometimes controversial (are they farming or ‘scraping’ content?); but I see it as experimenting  with where your audience is and their preferences. We also use SlideShare to repost some content which also allows readers to post comments (a feature not supported on cisco.com).  For many reasons, corporate web sites are often restrictive in how content can be viewed and distributed. So why not re-create some of it and post it elsewhere?  I would rather  it get consumed than force users to come to me. The days of controlling where and when users consume your content are dead.

The more places you post your content and the more formats you post your content in, the easier is to find. If we only posted videos on our community it wouldn’t work. We also post a written transcript so it’s easier for search engines to find us. A search engine can’t (yet) look inside a video and tell you the video is about. I’ve also posted the audio portion of a video for those who like to listen instead of read. Options. It’s all about options.

You have to educate yourself on what search engines like. Positioning on the page matters, for instance. There are many guidelines but they are always changing. We’ve gotten better and better at  getting our key topics to achieve higher placement in search results.

7) How do you engage experts to provide content?

There are two ways: By writing content that is somewhat controversial and by asking the right questions.  You don’t need all the answers; but being able to invoke thought and spur discussions (in favor or not), is the goal.

It’s also the way you present the content on the page. You also need to put some personality into it. Remember that only a very small percentage of your community will actually reply with comments. The vast majority people are listeners and observers of information. They’re not likely to take the time to rise up and make themselves known. They have better things to do. Even on sites like Amazon where there are so many comments, the huge majority of the users never post a comment. Don’t expect participation relative to the size of your readership. Keep in mind that not everything of value can be measured. Life isn’t that simple.

8)  What guidelines do you give your experts for contributing?

We give them recommendations for how to get their articles to show up on search engines. We work with them on modifying posts so they are less rigid and more casual. There’s a difference between textbook writing and something that is visually appealing. Most people quickly scan an article first to see if it’s worth it to slow down and read it. Laying  out the article with sufficient white space and easy-to-find inflection points is critical. It’s also important to insert questions throughout the article. No one wants to read through pages of dense copy trying to figure out what the author’s point of view is.  Get to the point!  Our community does not want read a doctoral thesis. They have very little time. They want to see what’s new, get inspired, learn something new, and move on.

– Lauren Bittner, Social Media Consultant, Impact Interactions.

Back to the blog

Why Community Management is NOT like Parenting

Community Management = Parenting? Really?

There has been a recent upsurge in community management/moderation blog posts comparing the care and nurturing of a community to that of a parent. As both a parent and someone who has helped companies build and moderate successful communities for over ten years, I couldn’t disagree more. Here’s why:

• The best moderators and community managers are passionate about the success of their community in meeting its goals. They are not passionate about or emotionally attached to the individual members.

Think I’m crazy? Look at the photo above. When two members go at each other in a community an emotionally attached community manager will take sides based upon who they feel is more important to the community or worse, based upon their interpretation of what happened. So rather than staying above the fray, they take sides. We’ve seen it time and time again. We work hard with our client teams to understand the downside of this behavior by the manager or moderator. What’s the fall-out from this behavior by the manager/moderator? Simple, it intensifies the problem rather than defusing it. Members want moderators who are impartial to settle disputes. So unlike a parent, the most successful community managers and moderators must remain emotionally detached.

• Getting too close to a member emotionally reduces your credibility as a moderator/manager in the eyes of the other members who aren’t close to you.

It matters what others think, even if incorrect. The most vocal and longest lasting problems in B2C communities that we’ve managed always revolve around the initial problem being compounded by claims of unfair treatment and support for one side over the other.  If you enter into a situation like this, your credibility will suffer in the eyes of many members. For example, at AARP the political action is fast and furious. We’ve seen members attack each other over many issues. (Liberals against Conservatives. Democrats against Republicans. Capitalists against Socialists. Wingnuts against Moonbats. ) Each time our moderators have stepped in, it has been to enforce the terms of service rather than take sides. While we are often accused by someone of taking sides, other members are quick to point out to the community that the moderators take action against them as well. That achieves a certain balance that while fragile is non-partisan. If you are emotionally attached to a member who is attacked, you are likely to over-react and set off a chain reaction. So unlike a parent you must stay above the fight and be partial. (Yes this sounds like a parental ideal, but in practice it’s almost impossible to pull off with your own kids because you are still too emotionally invested and want to settle the fight NOW!)

• The myth of not needing moderation continues to stay alive

This one is really interesting in my opinion. How can you compare community management to parenting and then say that:

“In fact moderation is rarely necessary where an effective community manager runs the community.” – Simon Phillips

Clearly, he’s never dealt with a two year old throwing a tantrum or a member doing the same in a community. As I mentioned in my comments:

“At the early maturity stage of a public community, the community manager must moderate in order to establish the community norms of behavior. That means removing offensive content or language or attacks. It also requires that the community manager contact the members whos content he/she has removed/edited. Otherwise the wrong example is set and the behavioral expectations are going to be harder to realize. If you don’t step in early, the bullies and soapboxers will dominate and reinforce the behavior that you don’t want to see (or that your client doesn’t want to see). Once that happens, your growth in realized value will slow as members join more to fight or spam or advertise rather than to contribute to a meaningful goal.

As the community matures, the need for behavioral moderation remains. Why? Because members don’t want to self-police and if they do, they often go after people they disagree with rather than true violations of the community norms or ToS.”

So here is the bottom line from Impact Interactions’ view of the online community world. In order to succeed in driving the results you want, act like a professional facilitator not a parent. Remain emotionally detached from your members to stay impartial. Focus on the results and in maintaining the norms and behaviors you want in your community rather than on the personalities. And don’t act like a parent, act like a professional.

Here are a few other takes on this idea:

Raising Good Communities – The Community Roundtable

You teach what you accept: As true in parenting as it is in online community management – FreshNetworks

Leading a Community is Like Parenting - Connie Bensen

Please feel free to add your thoughts on this analogy…

Mike Rowland, President

Back to the blog

Welcome to our Special Guest Blogger Matthew Lees

I grew up watching television shows where each week there was a “Special Guest Star” on an episode each week. These guests provided a little extra to the show and usually were cool celebrities. Think of all the villains on Batman for example or the Brat Pack on “Vegas” or the vacationers on Fantasy Island…or for those of you a little younger, the guests on the Simpsons.

Following that idea, I’d like to introduce our Special Guest Blogger, independent analyst Matthew Lees.

Matthew is a well respected analyst in the Social Media and Online Community World (see his bio here). He is the author of reports through the Patricia Seybold Group such as:

1. Selecting An Online Community Platform
2. Best Practices In Crowdsourcing
3. Analyst Report: Lithium’s Social CRM Suite

After reading his research and reviews of his findings, I thought Matthew truly understood how to make social media technology work in an enterprise organization. So, like all good social media practitioners I followed him on Twitter (@mlees) and his blog. Matthew and I first met in person at one of Forum One’s Online Community Unconferences. We’d been reading each other’s blogs and reports and discovered that we come to the industry with the same high level focus… using these tools to improve business results. While Matthew focuses on the technology and its impact, we focus on the process and the users. Together, we cover the issues that all enterprises need to succeed in their social media projects.

We decided in late December over a crab cake lunch here in Maryland, that we should find a way to collaborate together. Our idea is to inform, educate, and drive the best practices we’ve developed to a broader audience with this blog and our twitter accounts. Matthew will be posting here over the next few months both independently and collaboratively with our team members.

If you have a suggested issue of topic for us to cover, please contact us by adding a comment on this entry or by using our contact form.

So, with that said welcome Matthew!

Mike Rowland, President

Back to the blog

Social Media – The Global Story

The world is adopting social media at higher and higher levels according to a recent Neilsen Report.  According to the research by Neilsen, global time spent on social media sites increased by 82% in December 2009 when compared with December 2008. Pretty large increase especially if you look into the footnotes and understand that this research is based upon only U.S., U.K., Australia, Brazil, Japan, Switzerland, Germany, France, Spain and Italy. No China, no India, no Russia, nor are there any Nordic countries listed.

But this growth coincides with what we’re seeing here at Impact Interactions. We’ve helped develop and launch multiple communities in countries such as China, Russia, Italy, France, Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Poland, and elsewhere over the past several years. And while clients are still interested in their communities in the U.S. their focus is shifting. We are seeing more interest in companies asking us to help them launch communities and social media plans in countries ranging from Japan to Russia to Brazil to Mexico.

The growth in third party applications such as Twitter and Facebook have helped companies to understand the potential reach of the medium, but it is the local language social networks like StudiVZ (German) which have helped in-country marketing teams decide that they must be engaged with their customers using social tools. So even as Facebook moves past these local social media/networks, the smart marketer understands that it’s not the tool so much as it’s the growth that matters in deciding whether social media is a good tactic in a particular market.

In our experience leading a social media workshop in Innsbruck, Austria at the prestigious Management Center of Innsbruck it was clear that our non-US audience were more engaged on local language social media tools including blogs and social networks than on the U.S. offerings. (In fact, it was there that I learned more about StudiVZ and other offerings.)

That doesn’t mean that non-U.S. members are not on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. But it does mean that for the savvy global marketer the research and identification of which sites or applications to use is a bit more difficult. While the strategy remains the same, each Internet culture requires a clear focus on localized tactics. That means a cookie cutter approach using the same tools like Twitter, Facebook, or other application across multiple markets will not deliver the results you desire.

Watch the growth, it’s here to stay. But also look for the smaller sites that can deliever more value to your organization when using social media globally. As the old adage goes “All marketing is local.” The same applies to social media.

 

-Mike Rowland, President

Back to the blog

Social Media Monitoring Software – Welcome to the Emerald City

After four weeks of evaluating social media software vendors, we’ve come to some conclusions about the reality of these tools versus the hype that we heard along the way. Let’s just say that the parallels to the Wizard of Oz are pretty interesting…

Ever since I played the Wizard in third grade at Grant School,  I’ve really loved this movie, the books, and all things Oz in general. In fact, the head janitor at my town’s high school (Westfield HS in NJ) was one of the flying monkeys in the movie! But I digress…

Impact Interactions provides multiple types of social media services to our clients including consulting, moderation, and reporting. We’ve also been doing social media monitoring for several years for a couple of clients (although it was first called Brand Defense, then Reputation Management, and now Social Media Monitoring). It was a natural extension for our trained moderation teams to help clients. We’ve been looking for a good tool for our monitoring projects rather than relying on manual means of collection. We’ve spent several weeks talking with prospective clients for this service (and yes, it’s a service but more on that later). We’ve also been socializing ideas at conferences with other social media and online community folks to build our business case for adding this service.  So with all of that background, here is how the Wizard of Oz fits in…

I Am The Great And Powerful Oz!

In listening to people speak about social media monitoring tools, they believe that they are an all powerful tool for learning where all active conversations about their brand are being held online. The content is fresh, vibrant, and oh so relevant to their business objectives. Many believe that they’ll be able to manage the flow of information with this great tool, driving insights into their organizations effectively through the export of reports from these all powerful tools. Blogs- check. Twitter- check. Article comments- check. Communities- check. Sentiment analysis- check.

Unfortunately some of the hype around these tools has put vendors in the position of trying to meet these expectations with tools that look great, work smoothly, and export reports in a single click.

Ignore That Man Behind The Curtain!

Just as the Wizard was discovered to be a mere mortal, many customers are discovering that they had expectations that were far too high for the tools. What they are finding is that the tools take someone to work with them daily to review the delivered content, decide which nuggets of information are relevant, build the trends in content sentiment, and create the report.  Just as Dorothy and friends put all their faith in the wizard only to be disappointed when Toto pulled the curtain back, many companies are finding out that Social Media Monitoring requires more than a tool… it requires a team to review the content and deliver what is relevant.

I’m Not A Bad Person, Really.

The software vendors on the other hand must shake their heads when they hear the expectations for their tools. In our discussions with many of the top vendors (and some start ups too), we found them refreshingly honest about the capabilities of their tools. This was especially the case when the hot topics of Sentiment Analysis,  Twitter, and Online Community searches came up.

Sentiment analysis is an art form, not an absolute according to every single vendor we spoke with. The range of accuracy claimed by the vendors we spoke to ranged from a low of 30% to a high of 55%. In our B2B and B2C report testing, that range seems about right. Since most if not all vendors use a similar algorithm to categorize content, that would make sense.

In essence these tools work by analysing the 2-3 words prior and after the associated keyword to determine sentiment. As we can demonstrate, there are many false positives and negatives. To counter that, most allow the end user to rate or assign sentiment to content they find with the idea of strengthening the algorithm for future searches.

Twitter is another interesting discussion. Since Twitter is the social media du jour, everyone is interested in their Twitter buzz. The issue is that these tools use the Twitter search functionality rather than getting a full read into the Twitter Database of Tweets. (Say that five times fast!) So even the top tools are not much better than doing a Twitter search on your own. But as we were told, everyone of the vendors is working on this. According to Microsoft, Bing will have this capability soon. (Kara Swisher broke the news on this one.)

When the subject of online community content was discussed we received the same honest answers from everyone.  If the community has an RSS feed, they can get the information. If it doesn’t you are out of luck. We also learned that several vendors are working on a new tact to obtain the deepest of relationship content. One of those vendors is Boardreader. They are a company to watch if your interest is in content from communities.

The Good News – The Wizard Can Help!

Just as the Wizard offered to help Dorothy return to Kansas, many of the vendors in this space will offer to help clients to structure the searches for their project. But in the end, Toto runs off and Dorothy is still stuck in Oz. All the best intentions cannot overcome the single point that organizations need someone to run and make sense of the volumes of data these tools provide.

How Do We Get Back to Kansas Now?

Sometimes despite visiting a Wizard and killing a Witch or two along the way, you still need help to get where you want to go. That’s where we come in. At Impact Interactions, we recognize that Social Media Monitoring is a service. The choice of tools is important without a doubt, but it takes a person to effectively use the tool and report the results. We offer Social Media Monitoring as a service for clients.

Impact Interactions - A One Stop Shop for Social Media Monitoring

Impact Interactions has a great social media team using a top notch tool to provide social media insight reports for our clients. We understand that you are interested in seeing where the conversations are happening, but don’t have the time to review 1,000 blog posts, 400 tweets, and 500 comments each day. By hiring Impact Interactions, you can concentrate on your strategy while our team provides your Ruby Slippers. And you don’t even have to drop a house on us to get them.

But we don’t stop there! Our team’s experience in online communities is deep. Our social media associates can help you respond to bloggers, commenters, and Twitterers too. We believe that a social media monitoring project should be integrated into your communication efforts. Our team can help you execute that strategy at a reasonable cost.

Want to learn more? Please contact us or give us a call at (410) 604-3304 to discuss how your organization and team can get the most out of social media monitoring services.

Back to the blog

Online Community – Moving Beyond Metrics to ROI

We gave a presentation on building ROI models for online communities at the Online Community Unconference in Mountain View, CA on June 10th. It was added because so many of the participants stated that ROI and calculating the value of their community was the most important issue they faced.  So, we didn’t have time to build a true presentation, but rather lead a workshop for participants to learn more. It was lead by our president, Mike Rowland.

Here are the summary notes taken during the session:

• Have to first identify what is the economic value of the community to the organization offering it: (Don’t confuse traffic or behavior metrics with value)
  • Cost Avoidance
  • Increased subscription rates or lower churn rate
  • More frequent purchase rates
  • Higher purchase level/amts
  • Faster close for large item sales
  • Reduce lead generation cost
• Once you’ve identified your value metrics, break down your metrics into 3 buckets to look at communities:
  • Traffic – PV, visits, visitors, etc.
  • Behavior – What they do when the get there, who they are, download/visit, contribution/member, responses by employees vs. customers
  • Value – can attach an economic value to it. Need $ to get to a true ROI model. See above list.
• You have to build relationships w/ the folks in your company. Need access to other systems. You cannot build ROI from community analytics provided by software vendors or from traffic and behavior metrics alone. 
• ROI Frameworks:
  • Cost Avoidance
    • The person who proposes the question needs to verify the answer. This is a feature needed in the platform.
    • # of community support resolutions X $ complimentary support resolution (1-800 number) = total cost avoidance -> economic value
    • Track over set period of time (e.g. quarterly or yearly)
    • ROI = (total economic value – total costs to set up and run forum) / total costs –> over one period and as a percentage
  • Increased subscription or reduced churn
    • Customer database compared to community database
    • cust. database = Average churn rate (e.g. the number of months the avg user subscribes) X price/subscription = customer value
    • Community database – look at active members and see if the churn rate is better or worse.
    • Price will be the same, so you’ll have to see if the churn rate was more or less. If subscriptions are longer, than you have a higher customer value for community members.
    • Shows you slowed the churn rate down.
  • More frequent purchase or Higher Purchase level/amts
    • Use your eCommerce DB or CRM system
    • What is the avg amt customers spend/purchase?
    • go back to comm DB and parce out active members and compare to ecommerce DB (which ones spend more/purchase?)
    • Do comm members have a higher spend/purchase? active comm users X avg $ they spend = economic value
    • Need to trend this and see how it fluctuates.
    • what is the average number of items in completed shopping activity? (e.g. 1.6 items) Do comm members buy more?
    • Avg cost/item X avg # items = economic value
  • CRM decrease cost
    • Want to find what avg value of customer is
  • Faster close of sale (Good for large purchases like software or hardware systems)
    • How fast are organizations moving through your CRM system to sale?
    • Identify active organizations in community DB to compare them to avg organizations.
    • How long does it take the avg. organization to go through sale stages? What’s the cost/sale? Do active organizations in your community go through more quickly and spend more?
  • Lead generation cost
    • Similar to above, but use cost to generate a lead for average customer versus those which originate in community/social media campaigns
• How can you tell if a user came to your comm and then bought your product through a 3rd party reseller? You can’t unless your resellers provide access to their databases which is next to impossible to get.
• Users of support communities become brand neutral after their issue becomes resolved.
• Hidden costs of community for ROI Analysis, make sure you count these:
  • Servers
  • development costs
  • customizations
  • widgets
  • maintenance
• Make sure that you are amortizing your costs across the same time period as your economic value or you will skew your results.

One point to remember is that the value of communities really is derived from active members, not all members. So define your active members with criteria that meet your behavioral key performance indicators (KPIs). For example, an active member can be someone who posted in a forum, downloaded a featured whitepaper, uploaded content, or viewed a webcast in the past month. For B2B especially, it doesn’t have to be an activity within the past week as most B2B community members average 2-3 visits per month unless they are deep into the sales cycle.

The number one issue to watch out for when building your ROI framework is the use of proxies. If you cannot get the data, don’t guess at a proxy for the value because the more proxies you utilize the bigger the house of cards that you build.

Lastly, value can be a set of different items. For a subscription based community value can be both churn rate differential and purchase levels. ROI is not a single value formula, it is a multiple value formula in most cases as there is marketing value in support communities and vice versa. So make sure that you are at least attempting to capture as much of the value drivers as possible in your analysis.

Want to learn more about online community or social media ROI? Contact us today or leave a comment.

Back to the blog

B2B Communities – What Works

We gave a presentation at last week’s Online Community Unconference (site is open to the public as of June 19th per Forum One) in Mountain View, CA on B2B Communities. We weren’t surprised by the number of attendees looking to learn more about the best practices for running a B2B Community, but were surprised a little bit by some of the misperceptions on managing them.

Top Best Practices for B2B Communities:

1. B2B Community Members have higher expectations than B2C members. You must engage with them as they want to engage with your company just as much as they want to engage with their peers.
2. B2B Communities require internal SMEs to engage early and remain committed to meeting member needs until external SMEs can compliment the internal SME efforts.
3. Third party applications like Twitter and Facebook should not be used as external competitive communities, but rather should be utilized as beacons to drive traffic to your community and key information.
4. 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.
5. When budgeting for B2B communities, be realistic. For example, no single vendor of software or web design or implementation services will ever come in exactly where they quote when you want additional features or customization. So build a small cushion into your budget to be safe.
6. To attract business decision makers, you must focus on how they will use the site… not how you want to market to them.
7. The higher the level within an organization your potential members have attained, the lower the amount of time they will have to spend on your site. So don’t waste their time!

In short, B2B communities can deliver impressive results when managed properly with a focus on those segments who deliver the value to your organization. Don’t be all things to all people, that strategy is doomed to fail. To learn more about the best practices for B2B communities, please download our presentation , ask questions in the comments area below, or contact us.

Back to the blog