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…

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.”

——–

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

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.

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

© 1995-2009 AARP

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.

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

A Lesson in Customer Engagement from Shawshank Prison

© 1994 Castle Rock Entertainment

By Matthew Lees

One night while I was researching and writing a recent report on best practices in crowdsourcing, “The Shawshank Redemption” happened to be on TV. So I watched a bit of it for the umpteenth time. One scene jumped out as particularly relevant to what I was working on. I couldn’t find a way to weave it into the report, but it’s been on my mind ever since.

About halfway through the movie, the protagonist Andy Dufresne (played by Tim Robbins) ends up managing the library at Shawshank State Prison. In search of newer materials for his fellow convicts to read, he writes letters, interestingly enough at the warden’s suggestion, to the Maine State Senate. One letter a week. Every week. For years.

Eventually — actually, six years later! — he wears them down. Tired of his never-ending solicitations, the Senate sends him a check for $200. (The film takes place in 1947, so $200 was a tidy sum.) The library district also sends him boxes of books and magazines, along with a note saying they now consider the matter closed, so please, stop writing!

Success!

Surely our protagonist is pleased with the outcome. Well, he is…but he realizes that his persistence has paid off. So, with a twinkle in his eye, he says to a friend “From now on, I send two letters a week instead of one.”

I love that line.

Nothing succeeds like success, and the Main Senate and library district made Dufresne successful in his letter-writing campaign. (I’m admittedly focusing on this nice little moment in the movie, ignoring the harsh reality and horrid conditions under which Dufresne lives, although he does meet with success again later in the film.)

What did the Maine Senate do to deserve the increased volume of letters from the Shawshank librarian?

They listened and they took action.

Isn’t that what your customers (and business partners and employees) are looking for from you?

Crowdsourcing programs aren’t the solution to every problem, but they can be a great way to help you listen to your customers, and help them tee up their most important ideas, wishes, and requirements, so you can take action. For such programs to work, you need to engage people who not only have good ideas, but also the perseverance and determination to make things happen. If you’re running a crowdsourcing program (or managing an online community) your biggest wish should be to find and involve as many people as you can who have these characteristics in common with Andy Dufresne.

Like Dufresne, when people see how their actions generate positive results, they tend to repeat those actions. We hope your customers don’t need to be as determined as he was — your crowdsourcing efforts should see results in time frames closer to six weeks or six months than six years — but showing them how their input is making things better for your business, and, in turn, for them, too, should lead to both increased participation and a more effective and profitable business.

At least…I hope.

Notes from the Online Community Unconference East 2010

© 2010 Forum One Communications

By Matthew Lees

This week’s snow storm in New York City only marginally hampered this week’s Online Community Unconference East 2010 (OCUE10), a one-day event run by Forum One Communications. With a nod to local commuters, the program ended an hour early, although quite a few attendees were stuck in New York for the night due to rail and air cancellations. The snow kept some people at home, particularly those coming from more distant locations — it was disappointing, though understandable and, in hindsight, wise — that the Impact Interactions team didn’t venture north — but attendance overall was good. Not quite the 200 online community strategists, practitioners, vendors, and consultants that were originally expected that, but not too far off that number.

It was a good event, though not as strong as previous ones, despite the improved facilitation. Unconferences follow an Open Space-like methodology more frequently used, it seems, on the West coast than on the East. Attendees run the sessions themselves, selecting topics based something of interest, whether they’re expert in that subject or just want to talk about it and think others will, too. It’s a bit of organized chaos in which one of the underlying philosophical tenets is that you’re responsible for your own experience.

The Unconference’s theme was “Moving Forward, Together.” That’s a worthy and appropriate objective. Forum One did set the stage for us to think about our personal and professional goals, the direction of the industry, and ways of taking action and moving things forward, well, together. This is easier said than done, though, even for a group of inherently collaborative-minded souls. While I admittedly sucked the air out of a planning session intent on industry-wide adoption of social business metrics, the efforts are well intentioned. Making things happen will be a challenge, but with some sustained work and outreach to other concerned organizations, such initiatives could potentially gain some traction.

But my main frustration was that the sessions, which sometimes stay on topic and sometimes don’t, largely didn’t. Perhaps that’s part of the point of the format, to go wherever the discussions take you. But if I attend a session on, say, B2B revenue streams, I’d like to really dig into that topic. Tangents can be the norm, however. It also can take a while, sometimes 20 to 30 minutes of a one-hour session, for people to get on the same page regarding terminology. It’s not that the digressions are irrelevant or that the conversations are uninteresting; they’re usually not. It’s just that, more often than not, we didn’t get into the real substance I’m really looking for.

That said, it’s always good to see old friends, make new ones, and discuss things we’re all passionate about. Here are some observations:

• Job Changes and Hiring. In recent months I’ve seen more than a few community and social media professionals change jobs, sometimes due to layoffs, sometimes due to taking advantage of a new opportunity. At the OCUE 2010 I learned of even more. And a few people mentioned that their organizations were hiring. This is good news for the industry (although perhaps small solace for the many who are still looking for jobs).

• Business Value. It’s pretty clear that the exploratory phase is over for online communities. More and more organizations are all but requiring bottom line results, or at least a solid plan to get there. If you’re a vendor, agency, or consulting group that can speak to helping an organization achieve quantifiable, attributable ROI success, you’ll have a leg (or two) up the competition.

• Community Strategy: Beyond Your Site. Bill Johnston, Forum One’s Chief Community Officer and the Unconference’s host, summed this up nicely, saying “Most companies are trying to pull together a more holistic strategy.” A lot of attendees talked to this point, and how they’re trying to consolidate and streamline their community and social media strategies. If your organization is running one or more online communities, that’s one or more customer-facing touchpoints. But you’re likely involved with Twitter, LinkedIn, other social sites, and perhaps some independent communities as well. Fractured strategy translates into a poor customer experience, diminished brand identity, and limited business results.

• Organizational Issues. This one will be with us for a long time. Organizational dynamics play a major role in the success (or not) of community and social initiatives. They’re also a contributor to the many tales of woe that attendees talked about. People were looking for ways of breaking down silos, clarifying ownership, ending turf wars, undoing inappropriate and/or ineffective structure, and getting more buy-in from colleagues and the executive suite. (One of my favorite quotes was from a Microsoft community manager who said, referencing collaboration among his company’s business units, “Any coordination between these groups happens accidentally.” That’s too bad, but, sad to say, not uncommon.)

Look for the next Forum One Unconference in Mountain View, CA on June 9, 2010. It’s doubtful they’ll have to worry about snow…

Do You Use Social Media? Guess What…You’re a System Administrator

By Matthew Lees

The New York Times recently ran an informative article by Sarah Perez of ReadWriteWeb called “The 3 Facebook Settings Every User Should Check Now.” It’s about changes that Facebook made last December that affected user privacy, and what you can do about a few key pieces of personal information.

The article got me thinking about a Patricia Seybold Group report I wrote in 2007, entitled (rather cleverly, I thought), “Helping Customers with Self-Control…of Their Own Content.” The discussion and perspective in that report are even truer today than they were a few years ago, with the trend toward user control only increasing.

The upshot of the report was that, whether you blog or spend time on social sites or online communities, you’re doing more than participating in conversations, seeking out people and information, and creating content. You’re probably also deciding (1) who can see what, and (2) what they’re allowed to do with what they can see.

Well, guess what. That’s what system administrators do. Did you know you’re a sysadmin?

(Tell your parents. If yours are like mine, they won’t understand what it means, but they’ll be impressed. Actually, if your parents are on Facebook or any other social network, they’re sysadmins, too!)

Of course, professional sysadmins are trained and experienced in the subtleties and ramifications of managing access rights, setting up group/subgroup permissions, and troubleshooting things when problems arise. The rest of us are doing this as amateurs, whether we’re…

• setting permissions on our Flickr photos
• managing the privacy settings in our Facebook accounts
• determining what our public and private LinkedIn accounts look like
• deciding if your blog will accept anonymous comments or if people need to be logged in to comment
• deciding which groups of people (e.g., everyone, friends, or family), if any, can comment on our YouTube videos
• deciding what URLs in del.icio.us to share and what to keep private (for example, I’ll let most of URLs I tag be publicly viewable, but not the ones of my financial accounts)

As the Internet has enabled more and more of us not only to be Content Consumers, but also Content Creators and Publishers (the simplicity of blogging laid a lot the groundwork for this), the natural evolution has been for us to have control over this content as well. And it’s not just the content itself (your blog entries, forum posts, comments, video clips, photos, pictures, animations, etc.), but also the information about you (such as your profile information, both personal and professional).

The advantage of all this is that systems are increasingly giving us more control over both our content and profile information. Some platforms offer impressively – perhaps overwhelmingly – granular control of pretty much everything. This is a great trend, since it’s generally better to give people control over their own stuff.

But the disadvantage is that most of us don’t naturally take to this role or have the time to do it well. It takes attention to think through things and set them up the way we’d really want them to be. Most of us don’t have the bandwidth to do this for one site, let alone all the social sites and communities where we spend time. (Plus, things change over time, as with the Facebook situation above.) Therefore, as inexperienced and part-time sysadmins with a few other things on our plates, we may not be setting things up as well as we could. We typically rely on the defaults, which may or may not be in our best interests.

Why is this important?

• If you’re a technology vendor, you’ve got to figure out how to balance giving users granular control while making things easy for them to use. More tools, capabilities, and control is usually good, as long as you don’t confuse people, and having control over too much stuff can easily become overwhelming. Having an intuitive user interface can certainly help, but product managers have to draw the line somewhere.
• If you’re a social media user (and who isn’t?), you’ve got to decide how much time and brainpower to give the various settings on your content and personal/professional information at all the sites where you have an account. Most likely you’ll rely on the defaults, making changes only when a friend or colleague brings an issue to your attention, or when you come across a relevant article (or blog post!) that prompts your taking action.
• If you’re a community business sponsor, manager, or moderator, you’re looking to generate participation and sharing, while at the same time maintaining a safe and friendly environment. Participation can be enhanced by more open settings – the more people who can view things, the more discussion and collaboration will ensue – but if things are too open, particularly if users don’t realize or understand, conflicts can arise. How you set defaults, and how you communicate privacy and control settings is crucial. (Think about what can arise when a Facebook user doesn’t understand the consequences of giving visibility to Friends of Friends, for example, who you may not know…or trust.)

We haven’t even touched on other, non-sysadmin-related choices social media users have to make, such as how your content looks (control over design and layout; e.g., your blog header and Twitter background), and what people can do with your content (e.g., what license do you select to govern the photos you upload to Flickr?).

Decisions, decisions, decisions. For better or worse, though, in this do-it-yourself, connected, and increasingly social world, we’re all sysadmins now.

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

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