Thinking Past the Community’s Launch: A Warning from “The Candidate”

by Matthew Lees

I’ve been working with a few clients on upcoming online community deployments. As with the launch of most any technology endeavor, particularly Web-related ones, the energy and excitement become palpable as the launch date approaches.

The weeks and months preceding the launch are full of planning meetings, discussions of issues that inevitably arise, all kinds of decisions by a dozen different people wearing a dozen different hats, technological configuration and development, graphical work, customer outreach, testing, and much more. Most of these things are geared toward getting the community looking and functioning the way everyone envisions it will, so that it’s ready when the flip is switched and it goes live.

But the community’s launch is just the beginning. It comes after a great deal of work by a dedicated team, but it’s really just Day 1 in terms of what the community is fundamentally about. All the effort is put ahead of time in because, starting on Day 2, people will be asking questions, giving answers, solving problems, holding conversations, voting in polls, sharing ideas, getting to know each other, observing, learning, and providing some value to each other and to the sponsoring organization.

One of my roles in working with clients is to prompt them to be ready for what will happen after launch. But not every community team is prepared for Day 2.

The laser-sharp focus on the launch of a community, sometimes to the exclusion of what will happen afterwards, always reminds me of the ending of the 1972 movie “The Candidate.” The film stars Robert Redford as Bill McKay, the son of a former popular governor who has never had any political aspirations of his own. Prompted by veteran campaign strategist Marvin Lucas (played by Peter Boyle — I sure miss him) to run for the California senate seat, he takes on the task with conflicted intentions. The movie follows the race from announcement to primary to election, into the first few moments after the outcome is decided.

It’s a brilliantly perceptive and energetic film with a lot to say not only about politics of the 1970s, but also about politics in any era. And it has a lot to say on paying too much attention to short-term objectives, potentially to the detriment of long-term goals.

The final scene is a classic. There’s an excellent overview of the movie at the Film Night at the Park site. This excerpt is from the last paragraph:

“And then there’s the final scene, considered by many to be one of the most powerful political statements made in a Hollywood film. When the circus is over, and everyone packs up to leave, only one question remains. And it remains to this day, hanging in the air…”

I can’t spoil that line here, of course. Best is to watch the entire movie, to get the full impact. (If more instant gratification is required, you can view the final scene on YouTube or read about it on Wikipedia. Do watch the movie at some point, though.)

But that question remains, too, hanging in the air after an online community launches. If you’ve done your planning for Day 2 and beyond, you’ll know the answer.

[Fade to black]

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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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Will Employee Communities and Customer Communities Converge? (Part 3)

by Matthew Lees

The first post in this series laid out the question and noted some important similarities between internally facing and externally facing communities. The second post discussed key differences between such communities.

This third piece looks at employee and customer communities from the perspective of the vendors that provide tools, technologies, and services to organizations that sponsor online communities.

The Vendor Perspective
In one of my semi-annual industry reports (“Online Community Platform Company and Product Update – 1H 2008”), I wrote the following:

“2. Blurring of External vs. Internal Communities. Our focus at the Patricia Seybold Group is on enabling those who engage with companies from the “outside,” so we tend to be more interested in systems that support external communities of customers and/or business partners. This is not a clear delineation, though, as Web 2.0—social networking in particular—hits the enterprise. But as advocates of customer-centric approaches to business, we are sanguine on the trend that is moving away from the “us vs. them” mentality (with employees as “us” and everyone else as “them”), and toward a more group- or stakeholder-based approach, with customers and partners simply being another group of stakeholders. It’s happening slowly, but internal systems are being opened up to allow appropriate access to customers and partners. And community platform vendors are leading this trend; half of the companies we cover have products specifically developed for combined internal and external collaboration.”

That was written in August 2008. Many of the vendors I cover still offer products to support both employee and customer communities. Here’s a breakdown of some of the companies:

Technology Solutions for External Communities
•    Awareness
•    Lithium Technologies – Social CRM
•    LiveWorld – Community Center
•    Pluck
•    Powered – Social Marketing Platform
•    RightNow – RightNow Social Experience

Technology Solutions for Internal and External Communities
•    Blogtronix – Blogtronix Enterprise, Blogtronix Community
•    Ingeniux – Cartella
•    Jive Software – Social Business Software (SBS)
•    KickApps
•    Leverage Software
•    Mzinga – OmniSocial
•    Small World Labs
•    Telligent – Telligent Enterprise, Telligent Community

(There are a great many technology vendors that provide tools and services for supporting internal communities only. My fluency with these platforms is more limited, although some well known products are Atlassian Confluence, IBM/Lotus Connections, and Socialtext.)

One Foot in Both Camps
The vendors that provide solutions for internal and external communities have a foot in both camps. That gives them a larger potential customer base, but it also hampers their ability to excel in one area. So, while I am still “sanguine on the trend that is moving away from the ‘us vs. them’ mentality,” I’m not convinced this is the best long-term approach. I see three main reasons as to why:

•    Corporate Bandwidth. None of these vendors is in the Fortune 500 or Fortune 1000 range. They’re all relatively small companies doing cutting edge stuff, mind you, but they don’t have the deep pockets to be able to do everything they want to…and do them all well.
•    Marketing and Sales Strategies. In a nutshell, they’re selling to different people in different business units. Convincing the CIO and the head of HR to sign with you takes different materials, case studies, and ROI analysis than selling to the CMO, the head of customer service, or the chief of R&D.
•    Development Efforts. Developing software for different use cases is a challenge. These vendors no doubt receive feature requests from customers of their internal and external products; many of these requests likely overlap, but many likely don’t. Desired integrations have similarities and differences, too; integrating with social Web applications (e.g., Twitter and blogs) may be wanted by both camps, but those managing internal communities may ask for integrations with ERP, accounting, and scheduling systems, while those managing external communities may need integrations with CMS and CRM systems. Deciding on the direction of developmental efforts is a tough enough call when you’re serving just one market, let alone two.

To some degree, online communities are online communities. But vendors with one foot in the internal community camp and one foot in the external community camp have more challenging strategic decisions than those focusing in one area. Things are pretty good now for all vendors, as the world of social technology continues to blossom. Within the next year or two, though, I expect to see some changes, such as re-jiggering product lines, acquisitions, and consolidation.

Next
The final post in this series looks at Internal/Employee and External/Customer communities from the perspective of the people charged with managing and ensuring their success.

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Will Employee Communities and Customer Communities Converge? (Part 2)

by Matthew Lees

Part 1 of this topic framed the question of whether internal/employee communities and external/customer communities can potentially converge, and be managed via one group of people using one (pretty darn robust) technology platform.

My “Idealistic Answer” to this question was “Yes.” In the ideal customer-centric organization, the walls separating inside and outside would be more permeable than rigid, with customers being involved (as appropriate and as warranted) with a great many aspects of what the organization is doing across business units.

We live, however, in the real world…

Will Employee Communities and Customer Communities Converge?
Pragmatic Answer: No
While the walls that separate inside from outside may be coming down, the internal walls are seemingly as strong as ever. It’s hard to get those silos to tilt, let alone fall.

The unfulfilled promise of CRM is a good analogy here. Remember when “the 360-degree view of the customer” was all the rage? In theory, it was a great idea…have everyone in your organization working off the same system and the same data. Companies will benefit from the streamlined technologies and centralized resources (sound familiar?), while customers will benefit from more relevant marketing communications and offers, and from better-informed support reps who can provide improved service. This isn’t how things panned out, of course, largely because of the way that organizations are structured and operate.

So, in addition to the similarities discussed in the previous post, there are vast differences between internal and external communities, including:

1. Business Goals, Use Cases, and KPIs – While there is some overlap, the business goals are largely different (as are the Key Performance Indicators that measure them)…Employee communities are often looking to increase productivity, information sharing, knowledge retention (keep expertise within the organization), and employee satisfaction, while reducing, for example, the costs of system administration and training. Customer communities are often looking to positively impact the organization’s brand, increase customer loyalty and satisfaction, generate awareness, get more people in the sales pipeline (especially for B2B communities), increase direct and indirect sales (upsell and cross-sell), reduce costs through deflected service and support incidents,  and leverage customer-led innovation throughout the organization. Whew.
2. Business Units and Business Owners – The differences in business goals stem from the fact that different business owners head up these communities. Employee communities tend to fall within HR, IT, or Administration/Operations, while customer communities tend to fall within Service & Support, Marketing, or Product Development/R&D. As was the case with CRM, it’s rare that these business units are aligned in terms of needs, process, and technology.
3. Social Dynamics – The social dynamics between employee communities and customer communities are more different than they are alike. Both types of communities do rely on a core set of enthusiasts/influencers who handle a lot of the heavy lifting, but the reasons and motivations for participating in each vary. People act and interact differently when they wear different hats; in an internal community you’re wearing an employee hat, with all the good stuff and all the baggage that goes with it. (Think organizational politics; how candid are you going to be if you know your boss – and HR – are listening.) You’re potentially more anonymous in an external community wearing a customer hat, where, for most of us, the stakes are lower.

So What?
In the upcoming Part 3 — yes, there’s a Part 3 — we’ll explore what this means for both technology vendors that provide social tools, and for those practitioners tasked with managing employee and/or customer communities.

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Will Employee Communities and Customer Communities Converge? (Part 1)

By Matthew Lees

Social technologies have had a big impact on the ways that companies do business, both inside and out. Organizations are using social tools – discussion forums, blogs, microblogs, social bookmarking, wikis, and more – to help employees be more productive and effective. They are also using the same types of tools to engage with those outside their organization, i.e., their customers (users, readers, members, etc.) and business partners.

Social media is helping to break down the walls that separate internal from external. Those traditionally outside the organization not only know more than ever before about what’s going on inside (thanks to blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc.), they also have more of an opportunity and ability to influence things within the company (for example, through crowdsourcing mechanisms). For the most part, it’s easy enough to set up a collaborative space for members of a customer advisory group, for example, to interact directly with a group of employees. And if you manage a customer community, you can – in fact, you should – have employees intimately involved. The lines between inside and outside are becoming increasingly blurred.

I’ve had a handful of recent conversations — with vendors and with practitioners at B2B, B2C, and employee communities — about this potential coming together of employee and customer communities. If social software and social media are at the heart of the shift towards increased interaction, collaboration, and transparency, perhaps there is an eventual convergence that can be supported by a single social technology system. Why can’t there be one technology platform and one set of resources supports (1) internal communication, collaboration, and learning, as well as (2) external collaboration, customer engagement, and peer-to-peer support?

After all, social is social, right?

Will Employee Communities and Customer Communities Converge?
Idealistic Answer: Yes
As someone who resonates with just about any customer-centric approach, I love the concept of an organization that values customer ideas and insight (and builds process around such input), and looks to connect employees working on specific initiatives to relevant and interested. A convergence of employee and customer communities would enable this to happen more painlessly and more frequently.

Employee/Internal and Customer/External communities have a great many similarities. Both types of communities…
•    look to enhance communication and collaboration among individuals and groups
•    leverage similar tools and technologies (e.g., wikis, forums, blogs, microblogs, etc.)
•    have, at their core, user profiles and directories
•    need to support both individual users and groups, all with granular permissioning to provide appropriate access
•    require underlying technology that can integrate with other data sets and applications (e.g., CRM systems, registration and authentication systems, etc.), extend , be secure, and scale as needed
•    depend upon authenticity and transparency
•    benefit from data analysis by someone for whom the success of the community is important, and who can make improvements based on the analysis

Leveraging these similarities would mean streamlined technology and centralized resources, which are certainly directly beneficial to organizations, and indirectly beneficial to customers.

So there’s a lot to like about the concept of a single technology platform that supports both employee and customer communities. It fits in philosophically with the direction in which many social media enthusiasts think organizations should be headed. But there’s this little thing called “business reality” that sometimes gets in the way …

Next: Part 2 – Pragmatism Rears its Ugly Head

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Social Media Management Tools – Are they Ready for the Enterprise?

by Matthew Lees

Over the past 6-12 months a lot of companies and technology platforms have entered the market purporting to make it easier for individuals and organizations to participate throughout the social Web. If you’ve got accounts at one or more social sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, and LinkedIn, why, for example, should you have to log into each one? Wouldn’t it be much easier simply to log into one interface to organize, read, post, and search comments?

I’ve seen the phrase Social Media Management used as a catch-all for these types of tools. That sums things up as well as anything else.

To a basic degree, this is the idea behind Twitter-centric apps such as HootSuite, Seesmic, and TweetDeck. If you’re using Twitter on your own, these programs may meet your needs just fine. But the social Web stretches beyond Twitter and, if you’re responsible for social media at a large organization, you’ve got quite a few requirements beyond convenience. When the stakes are high, when there are more than one or two stakeholders involved, and when time – yours and your colleagues’ – is at a premium, many of these systems fall short.

What Makes Social Software Enterprise* Ready?
I see six main categories where enterprise social applications differentiate themselves from software that isn’t ready or appropriate for enterprise environments:

1. Security – We’ll start with what’s probably the most obvious item on the list. Enterprise social software adheres to high standards of security, both in terms of technology (i.e., secure protocols) and process (i.e., the ability to define access and keep audit trails; see below). How comfortable would you be sending your social security number to someone via a Twitter direct message?
2. Access, Accountability, and Auditing – These are the three As of enterprise social software. (Well, I just made that up…but it works well.) Social software for the enterprise lets system administrators set user permissions and access in a granular and effective way; it tracks activity and creates an audit trail, so you can determine who did what, when; and it allows for passwords to be recovered and/or changed as appropriate.
3. Content Management – Twitter is an example of a very rudimentary form of content management, which is pretty much based purely on a “push” model of publishing. Once you tweet, it’s out there…you can’t take it back and you can’t change it. Enterprise social software includes content management capabilities that let you save, undo, modify, and schedule for publishing at a later date. It also lets you adapt content to the particular channels you’re sending it to, and to choose which channels to send what (i.e., “I want this post to go to Twitter and Facebook, and I want that comment to go to our corporate blog).
4. Performance – This primarily encompasses speed, scalability, and reliability. For example, if Flickr or Facebook go down for a while, you’ve got little, if any, recourse. With enterprise social software, you should have support people to talk with and (usually) SLAs in place.
5. Integration Points – Enterprise social software will have hooks that allow for bi-directional integration, so data can come in from appropriate sources, and be sent out to other places (such as other applications, such as a CRM system, sites on the social Web, or your branded customer community). The architecture is important here, as ideally the platform’s engine is robust enough so that when the next new big social network crops up, it would be easy enough to configure its integration.
6. Analytics and Reporting – Social analytics providers are doing strong business helping organizations make sense of the social Web. Most social sites and tools provide woefully limited statistics. Of course, they weren’t designed with reporting in mind – particularly unified reporting, which lets you look at everything from one place — but if you’re using them for your business, you need to understand their effectiveness and impact. And that goes beyond counting how many Twitter followers and Facebook fans you have.

Note that many of these items translate into increased productivity. Social Management Tools, whether enterprise-ready or not, are largely, though not exclusively, about making it easier for individuals and organizations to do social media more efficiently and effectively.

Social Media Management Platforms
A few of the companies doing some interesting and promising things in the Social Media Management space are:
•    Socialize Your Stuff (Butterfly Publisher platform)
•    Regroup
•    Social Agency (Spredfast platform)
•    Spry Hive Industries

Community platform vendors are also thinking about how branded communities fit into all this, as well. On the leading edge of the trend toward connecting your customer communities to the social Web are:
•    Awareness
•    Lithium Technologies
•    LiveWorld
•    RightNow Technologies (Social Experience platform)
•    Pluck

Of course, the tools can only do so much. Technology platforms won’t get you where you want to go without a sound business strategy and a plan for engaging with your customers, members, readers, followers, prospects, etc.  But if you’re evaluating — or reevaluating – your social media strategy and presence, the six items above will play a central role.

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* What I Mean by “Enterprise”
“Enterprise” is one of those buzz words that means different things to different people. I’m using it here in a somewhat non-rigorous way to really mean a level of sophistication and maturity. Enterprise software is sturdy and full-featured, to meet the many and varied needs of professional organizations. In this way, it relates to the concept of enterprise architecture, particularly the definition from the MIT Center for Information Systems Research: “Enterprise architecture is the organizing logic for business processes and IT infrastructure reflecting the integration and standardization requirements of the firm’s operating model.”

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Goodbye Call Center, Hello People Power – The giffgaff Experiment

By Matthew Lees

giffgaff is a UK-based mobile telephone service provider that runs off the O2 (Telefónica Europe) network. Basically, what it offers is a pre-paid SIM card that you pop into your (unlocked) mobile phone. (European wireless phone service operates on the GSM standard. In the US, many mobile carriers provide “locked” phones which only accept one type – their type — of SIM card. There’s much more flexibility and compatibility across Europe and, indeed, through the rest of the mobile-phone-using world.)

At giffgaff’s Web site (http://www.giffgaff.com), you can order a giffgaff SIM card and add money to (a.k.a. “top-up”) your existing card.

What you can’t do at the site, though, is contact a customer service representative. Not by phone and not by online chat.

giffgaff does provide a single email address for inquiries; automated acknowledgments promise a response within 24 hours. So somebody is handing email support, which is an asynchronous communications channel. But giffgaff does not have agents who provide synchronous support. (I suppose, though, that if you were to show up at giffgaff’s HQ in Slough, England, there’s a pretty good chance they’d help you out in real time. Based on the tone of the language used on the site, they seem an amiable, if borderline mischievous, bunch.)

No Operators Are Standing By
By not having customer support reps awaiting your calls, giffgaff can keep its prices low and its operation streamlined.

Instead, the company provides support nearly exclusively via Web-based self-service and its customer community. giffgaff’s FAQs, question and answer area, and discussion forums are its primary customer service mechanisms.

Within the community, which is running on Lithium Technologies’ Social CRM platform, giffgaff customers answer each others’ questions. Hence giffgaff’s taglines: “Mobile network with a difference” and “We’re people powered.”

It’s Payback Time
All online communities rely on the contributions of a small but essential numbers of dedicated members who answer a large and disproportionate number of questions. These “active contributors” or “super users” are the lifeblood of their communities and an essential part of their communities’ cultures. They typically participate for the personal and professional connections they make, the inside information they may get, the opportunity to learn, the ability to enhance their reputation and “strut their stuff,” and the sheer fun of it.

giffgaff adds another motivation to this list: making money. The more questions you answer, the more “Payback Points” you receive. Payback points (100 points = £1) can either go toward topping up your giffgaff account or be deposited into your bank account as cash.

In fact, there’s more to Payback points than just answering more and more questions. The better your answers are, the more points you receive, too (this is done via Lithium’s “accepted solution” feature). And you can also earn Payback points by acting as a giffgaff evangelist, getting friends to join and promoting the service (e.g., through social sites and networks such as YouTube and Twitter).

A Sustainable Support Model?
It’s a relatively new business and a relatively new community, having only launched in Q3 2009. And it’s still in beta (although this doesn’t mean what it used to; Gmail was ostensibly in beta for about five years). The site is certainly focused and playful. Is it effective, though? It’s too soon to tell. But here are the questions percolating in my mind:

•  How are giffgaff’s group andsocial dynamics different from those communities that don’t have financial incentives? I’d expect that that the giffgaff community wouldn’t put up with much nonsense, as that would get in the way of earning points. But would this lead to a more or less tolerant community and enjoyable community experience?
•  Can giffgaff provide satisfactory support on a long-term basis without a contact center?
•  If so, can this model work in other industries, or are there aspects of giffgaff’s business (e.g., the telecommunications industry, its particular demographics, etc.) that may make it work for them, but not elsewhere?

A quick Web search shows that “giffgaff” is a Scottish word referring to mutual accommodation or mutual giving. Seems like an appropriate name for an ostensibly people-powered network. Kind of a “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” thing. If things at giffgaff go according to plan, the UK could see an awful lot of scratching…

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Ricky Gervais (Unintentionally and Eloquently) on Facebook vs. Customer Communities

by Matthew Lees

While driving yesterday to pick up my sister at the airport, I listened to a delightful interview on the radio with Ricky Gervais. He was on the NPR program Fresh Air, talking with David Bianculli — nope, it wasn’t Terry Gross, but veteran TV critic Bianculli is very good, too — about his new animated series on HBO, “The Ricky Gervais Show.”

I’m a fan of Gervais’s, despite the fact that I haven’t watched many episodes of either the US or UK version of “The Office.” (Steve Carell stars in the US version, which is based on the original UK program, created by and starring Gervais.) Through his other shows, his stand-up routines, and his podcasts, you can tell he’s a funny, clever, candid, and amiably self-deprecating guy.

About halfway through the NPR interview, Gervais gives his take on making big-budget shows that aim for mass appeal versus smaller shows that may find only a relatively small, but more interested and passionate audience. He says:

“But, I think I’d rather do stuff that makes a big connection with a few people than a small connection with loads. I’d rather this be a few people’s favorite show, than, you know, millions and millions of people’s 10th favorite show. Because what’s the point otherwise?”

There you have, in a nutshell, the essential difference between a Facebook community and a branded customer community.

Big Connections with a Few vs. Small Connections with “Loads”

You can potentially and relatively easily build up a Facebook fan base that’s much larger than your own branded customer community. With just a single click, people can “Become a Fan” of your organization (or TV show); there couldn’t be a much lower barrier to entry. And marketers tend to love volume.

But the strength of these “Fan” connections isn’t particularly great. Most fans probably never return to the organization’s Facebook page again, and the conversations in the Discussions area tend to be superficial.

In a community that you sponsor and manage, though, you’re building much closer relationships, with stronger connections to your organization and the products and services you offer. (You’re also enabling stronger connections between community members, too.) You members are discussing topics and issues of interest and concern; they’re asking questions and giving answers; and they’re bringing up problems and providing solutions.

Strong and Weak Ties

Network theorists and sociologists call these different types of connections strong ties and weak ties.

(Contrary to how Gervais phrases it, though, there are indeed benefits to weak ties. There is indeed an answer to his rhetorical question “…what’s the point otherwise?”, as good things certainly can come out of being the 10th favorite show of millions and millions of people, especially if you’re an advertiser or an actor, writer, or producer on the show.)

But the main point that Gervais encapsulates is that it’s not always about reaching the most people you can. Big connections (i.e., strong ties) can be more meaningful than small connections, at least to some people and organizations. Marketers (and others in your organization) love deep relationships with people, too.

Your social media strategy should ideally include programs that leverage what both strong- and weak-tie connections have to offer.

Of course, you may not want to base your entire strategy on Gervais’s musings. He’s also the man who said (via David Brent, his Office persona), “If at first you don’t succeed, remove all evidence that you tried.”

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For Further Reading
A lot of interesting and useful information is available on the types and degrees of online social connections. Some is academic in nature and some discusses real-world ramifications and practical aspects of these connections. Here are a few sites with good stuff on ties…
•  Karrie Karahalios: Strong and Weak Ties in Social Media, by David Weinberger (March 3, 2010)
•  40 Years On: The History & Evolution of Social Media, by Jenny Ambrozek (November 4, 2009)
•  Weak Ties Build Strong Networks, by Adrian Scholes (May 21, 2009)
•  Design Your Own Custom Ties on Zazzle

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A Recipe for Not Getting Your Community off the Ground

By Matthew Lees

Ingredients:
•    ½ Tbs old-school business mind set
•    7 oz. siloed business units
•    2 tsp fear of the unknown
•    1 cup over-analysis

Mix ingredients together. Remove leadership, vision, and an understanding of customer needs. Serve chilled.

————————–

A terrific marketing communications manager I know was charged with doing preliminary research and laying the groundwork towards building an online customer community. She works at a large B2B company that designs, manufactures, and supports particular high-tech products used in all sorts of equipment. With the excitement from this new and interesting project, she tackled her assignment with fervor, bringing in a lot of knowledge about business planning and goals, technology requirements and platforms, necessary resources, milestones and timeframes, and so on.

This was a year and a half ago. The community has yet to launch.

Why? The main reason is that the organization’s culture and structure got in the way.

The initiative started in marketing communications. The original goal was to provide a community space for engineers to ask questions, find answers, pose problems, find solutions, and learn from each other, with the company participating ensuring a comfortable environment and chiming in as warranted. The vision was for this community to be a place where thought leadership developed and where learning and education were the norm (particularly for younger engineers, who could learn from the experiences of the veterans), not only about the company’s products, but also about their overall industry.

[To answer the question you’re about to ask…the support organization, already understaffed, wasn’t particularly interested in the project, which is why marketing took it on, as a customer engagement effort.]

Internal Pushback

As these plans developed, there was pushback from people with concerns that they were moving too quickly. The company has been around for many years, and there were too many concerns about the uncertainty of this strange new. They appreciated that they eventually had to go in this direction, but wanted to take things more slowly. In particular, there were the usual objections that dirty laundry would be aired (“What if they say bad things about us?”) and that prospective customers would be steered to competing companies (“What if they say good things about our competitors?”). It would be better, these execs felt, for the company’s initial foray into community to be via a safer route.

The marketing communications manager just didn’t have enough sway to keep things on track, so the community project changed. Rather than start with a customer-facing community, they’d provide a space for their global field service engineers. Some of these engineers were employees, and others were contractors, but they were all frustrated by an inability to find up-to-date documents and to share best practices with each other. Giving them a community space where they could easily access current documentation and hold topical conversations with each other seemed like the place to start.

Only it didn’t start, because the use case was now different, and dramatically so. Instead of a public customer community, they were now looking to create a private collaboration space. Sure, both concepts had some overlapping technological requirements (discussion areas, document repositories, profile pages), but these are vastly different types of business projects that fall within different business units, require different resources, and have different measures of success.

A Different Business Case

The marcomm person was still involved, although this new direction didn’t have the same appeal for her. It was turning into an IT project, when what had originally jazzed her was the ability to connect, and connect with, customers. So it was pretty much back to square one. (For example, she had previously pulled together a short list of technology vendors with community platforms that fit the bill. Now, though, she had to look at platforms that supported the added requirements from the new use case.)

But this new concept moved haltingly as well, since there were several concurrent technology initiatives rolling out that already had collaborative components. So the cry came up for further evaluation and analysis.

Where are They Now?

Still in the planning stages. The recent boom of social media has generated increased interest in a public customer community, so there are renewed efforts there. And the informational needs of the field service engineers remain imperfect, so improvements through social software are in the works there, too. What seems to be happening is a separation between the two projects.

So things are moving forward, and the marketing communications person feels confident that they’ll launch a customer community by mid-2010. But they’ve added to existing organizational friction, and they’ve lost a lot of momentum.

They’ve also lost an opportunity to be a market leader. In today’s increasingly competitive world, that can be a recipe for disaster.

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There’s No Place Like (the) Home (Page)

by Matthew Lees

They say, in politics, you can tell an administration’s priorities by its budget. Office holders can talk all they want about the importance of education, services to seniors, and having the latest and greatest fire-fighting equipment, but are they putting their money where their mouths are? It’s the how they allocate the dollars that tells you what they’re serious about.

Similarly, you can tell a company’s priorities by what’s on its home page.

Sure, home page real estate is precious, and what does or doesn’t appear there (and where it appears) can be a contentious issue. I don’t know of any fist fights that have broken out over what links appear on the home page (and where they appear), but I’ve been around some pretty heated discussions.

The debates are understandable, as your home page can be the gateway to your organization (and your products and services) as well as the first impression it makes. It also cuts across organizational lines, as just about all departments are impacted to one degree or another and should, therefore, have at least some say in the matter. Many voices makes for difficult decision making.

Of course, it’s not all about the home page. There are many ways besides your home page that customers, prospective customers, business partners, and others can discover the content within your site, including community content. In many ways, Google is your home-away-from-home page, as that’s often the entryway to your site’s content. So what’s on your internal pages, and your overall SEO efforts, will also have a sizable impact on how people get to your content.

But there’s no getting around the visibility, cachet, and effectiveness of being on the home page.

So the question comes down to: Is there a link to your customer or partner community on your home page?

If your customers (or partners or readers or users, etc.) are important enough to your organization, there will be. Linking to your community on your home page not only makes it easier for people to find your community, it also makes it easier for people to find each other. And, perhaps more importantly, it makes the symbolic statement that you highly value your customers and their perspectives – the good, the bad, and the ugly – by supporting their candid discussions, collaboration, and networking, and by being part of the conversation yourself.

(I’m not talking about displaying links to your Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter pages. That’s all well and good, but that’s done more for marketing purposes than customer engagement.)

Here’s a selection of a dozen organizations that feature their communities via prominent links on their home pages. (There are certainly many others. If I handed out Customer Community Seals of Approval, all these sites would get them for their home page placement alone.)

•   AARP

•  Adobe

•  American Diabetes Association

•  Caterpillar

•  EMC

•  LeapFrog Enterprises

•  The MathWorks

•  NetApp

•  RIDGID

•  Sage Software (ACT!)

•  Unilever (Slim-Fast)

•  VMware

Many other organizations link to their communities from their home pages, but in less prominent locations. While not ideal, that’s still good. But many companies, even ones with vibrant communities, don’t put them on their home pages at all. Often this is despite the best efforts of the community team. The community manager in one such company has been trying to get a home page link for over a year.

How do you make the home page thing happen? Here are some things to try:

1. Begging and pleading.
2. Looking for examples of competitors that feature their communities on their home pages. Nothing spurs action like showing what the competition is doing.
3. Asking to include a home page link for a trial period of, say, one month. Measure the impact this placement has on the community metrics you track. Can you show a compelling correlation between a home page link and an increase in page views, membership, and return visits? Can you translate these numbers to positive business results?
4. What else works? Perhaps those of you who have fought this battle can share your experience and insights below…

While I haven’t formally tracked home page links to communities, it does appear that this practice is increasing. And that’s a good sign. When it comes to showing your customers how you value them, there’s no place like home.

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