Communities.cisco.com Reaps Rewards of Sound Strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q: What is the biggest challenge ahead of you?

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

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

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EMC Documentum Developer Community Takes Support to the Next Level

Today Impact Interactions follows Jerry Silver and the EMC Documentum Developer Community on a long, successful journey the site started in 2001 as a place for tools and code to its current state, the full-fledged flourishing community bursting at the seams with member-generated content that it is today. Impact Interactions’ interview with Jerry offers important insights into the best practices that have not only allowed the community to align with Documentum’s business goals but have also nurtured its progression beyond a basic online support space for its members into a valuable destination for them to enhance their reputations and expertise.  Learn from Jerry as he covers everything from how to maintain a steady, well-organized flow of content via the involvement of subject matter experts to tips on recognizing employees and non-employees in a way that results in their ongoing participation.

1) What is your role at EMC and with the community? How long have you been with EMC?

I work in product marketing, covering Documentum xCP, a family of products for Application Composition, Business Process Management and Case Management.  I’ve been here for about 3 ½ years.  Within our marketing group we’re organized by product and also by channel.  In my case, the product is Documentum xCP, and the channel is social media and community for xCP and related products.  Developers are a key constituency for my products, which has led me to the role of manager of the Documentum Developer Community.

2) What is the community’s purpose and when was its inception?

As the name suggests, the Documentum Developer Community is a destination for developers that build on the Documentum platform. We also provide lots of great content covering all technical aspects of the platform, such as administration, integration, and performance tuning.  The community is completely public and complements our support forums, which are currently only accessible to customers with a support contract. That said, we’re putting plans in place to make the support forums public and to integrate them into the community.  So the community’s primary purpose is to meet the needs of our members. It supports them in the use of our products, helps them build their knowledge, recognizes them for their expertise, and allows them to network and share information with other developers.

For the company, the community is a channel for increasing product satisfaction and engaging directly with our customers.  We learn a lot about how they’re using our products and the direction they  need us to take  to meet their business and technical needs.

The community grew organically from a home grown site that was launched in 2001 and primarily provided downloads of developer tools and sample code, to the site that you see today.  It’s part of the larger EMC Community Network (ECN) and runs on a commercial platform (Jive SBS).  Downloads are still important, but we now offer considerable interactive, member-generated content – wikis, blogs, discussions, videos, polls, etc.

3) Tell us about your membership. How has it changed over time? Who are they? Customers? Partners? Employees?

ECN has around 200,000 members, but that’s across all of EMC.  We don’t break the numbers out by community since all communities share a common user base.  I can tell you that our community alone gets more than 20,000 unique visitors every month, and many of those visitors make repeat visits during the month and beyond.  Because the community has evolved over 10 years it’s difficult to say how much it’s grown over that time.  Participation is roughly 20% by employees and 80% non-employees.  A large number of partners participate but we don’t break them out as a separate group.  We are looking at programs to more directly engage partners.

4) Give us some examples that demonstrate how the community has achieved its business  goals.

In terms of meeting member needs, the numbers speak for themselves.  The number of unique visitors is growing, as is the number of first time visitors.  We’re able to maintain that momentum through a steady stream of new content, in addition to  programs like developer contests that offer substantial prizes and generate a lot of interest and useful content in terms of contributed code and expertise. Our last major contest had a $50,000 prize pool.

A key business goal for our division is to encourage an approach to development based on modeling and composition, rather than writing raw code.  This approach is supported by our newest toolset, Documentum xCP, and is a transition for many of our members who are familiar with our legacy APIs and more traditional, code-intensive methods. This has therefore become a focus for the community, and we’ve seen interest shift towards the xCP and composition related information, which is now the most popular content on the site.  It includes a substantial and growing library of “xCelerators” – sample applications, pluggable components, design patterns, and best practice guides that extend our product set in highly useful ways.  So the community has also become an effective distribution channel for product extensions that is much more dynamic and agile than the traditional release cycle.

We’re also starting to track how the community contributes directly to revenue generation.  This is a challenging problem, but we’re figuring out how we can correlate community participation with sales wins and repeat business.

5) What are your greatest challenges and how have you addressed them?

Our community is very content rich, which is great but poses challenges in navigation  – just finding the right content.  One approach that works is to enlist subject matter experts to “curate” content. For example, we have created index pages that guide members to relevant information.  We’re also in the midst of a usability review and expect to revamp the user experience in the near future.  Unlike most marketing Web sites, which are highly architected from the outset, community content grows organically, as new industry topics become relevant and emerge .  While  “too much” content is a nice problem to have, it does mean that a periodic refresh of the community design and navigation is required to keep up with the constant flow of information and interaction communities contain.

Member engagement is another challenge that requires some investment.  For the past couple of years we’ve focused on internally produced content. Getting employees to  participate amidst other competing priorities can be difficult.  It requires persistence and constant evangelism.   What works well is to find employees that are inherently motivated to contribute, and to recognize and reward their participation to create incentives for others to follow.  The reward doesn’t have to be monetary. It seems that just seeing your product or latest blog post featured in the community can be reward enough. We’ve even seen team members compete for who gets the most page views in a month.  We’ve recently had some success with a leader board that tracks the most popular content and the most prolific contributors for a particular segment of the community.  That seems to be working. I’m starting to be approached by more groups that want a presence in the community.

Now that we have an active core of internal contributors we need to encourage more non-employee-generated content, beyond discussions.  For that, we’re looking at introducing reward and recognition programs that will identify community MVPs and provide incentives for increased participation.  I believe that recognizing a member’s expertise and contributions to the community is the best incentive, but sometimes you also have to help things along with the occasional iPad giveaway.

6) What are three best practices that you’ve taken away from this community?

We’ve recently become more consistent about tracking metrics, and I regret that we didn’t do this sooner.  But don’t just track metrics for their own sake.  Make sure you’re measuring meaningful activity, and that the metrics lead to actionable results.  For example, we started tracking the top searches.  These indicate members’ interests, which helps with content planning, but also tells us what they’re having trouble finding in the community.  That prompts us to use curation techniques like index pages to help them discover and browse to content instead of searching for it.  Metrics have also helped us sell the value of the community to senior management, who are more willing to invest in community programs if they can see a measurable impact on revenue or customer satisfaction.

A continuous flow of new content is important, but equally important is the organization of that content.  Many community managers understand the role of moderation, but don’t realize that curation is just as important.  Moderation is mostly about ensuring that community content is appropriate and that responses to questions are given when needed, but curation is about making content easy to find and keeping it up to date. Note too, that these are different roles that require different skill sets.  A non-technical community manager can handle moderation tasks, but subject matter experts who understand the content and the members’ needs are needed to curate.

Finally, recognize that B2B communities differ from B2C social networks, and have a distinct set of challenges and approaches.  In a B2B community, the company is much more welcome as an active participant, and in fact is expected to play an active role.  B2B customers want to engage with their vendors and get to know the personalities behind the products, and that personal connection can be a powerful tool for winning and sustaining customer loyalty.

7) Is there anything we may have missed that would give the world a great example of how your community is benefiting EMC?

Many vendors host a community to answer post-sales support questions and think they’re done.  That’s a necessary starting point, but it isn’t really a community until it becomes an integral part of the members’ professional lives.  I think our community has evolved well past its support roots to become a valuable destination for our members to enhance their reputations and expertise.  And it’s proving to be an effective channel that engages customers at all stages of the “buy cycle” – pre- and post- sales – which brings real value to our business.

Jerry Silver has over 25 years of IT development and marketing experience, specializing in content management, collaboration, application development, Web technologies, BPM, and social media. Jerry spent 15 years at Oracle in a variety of technical roles, most recently as Principal Product Manager of Oracle Application Server Portal. He also served as Director of Product Strategy with content management vendor NCompass Labs, now part of Microsoft, and was Director of Product Management for XMetaL, a leading XML authoring tool. Jerry is currently Senior Product Marketing Manager for the EMC Documentum xCP Platform, and is also responsible for the Documentum and xCP Developer Communities.

Blog: https://community.emc.com/blogs/ecmteam
Twitter: http://twitter.com/JerrySilver
LinkedIn: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/jerrysilver

- Lauren Bittner is Senior Director of Client Services at Impact Interactions and has 10 years of experience with helping companies align their social media efforts with their business goals.

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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.

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Impact Interactions Welcomes Experienced Social Media Professionals Lauren Bittner & Adam Crawford!

With our continued growth here at Impact Interactions, we’ve recently added two experienced professionals to help our clients’ social media and online community projects succeed. Please join us in welcoming Lauren Bittner and Adam Crawford to our team!

Lauren Bittner (Social Media Consultant) brings over nine years of professional experience in the social media and loyalty programs to help our clients drive deeper, meaningful relationships with their members. With consulting and management experiences ranging from IBM and McGraw-Hill to Allstate Insurance and Ace Hardware, Lauren has a strong foundation in the B2B social media world. She will initially support the Hall of Fame and Expert member recognition program at Cisco’s CSC as well as support additional projects both for Cisco and our other B2B clients.  Prior to joining us at Impact Interactions, Lauren helped improve usability for client sites as well, bringing another dimension to our services for clients. Lauren got her start in social media at online community pioneer Participate.com.

Adam Crawford (Social Media Consultant, Business Development) is an experienced social media professional with over ten years experience in helping large organizations with their social media and online communities. In his experience, Adam has managed teams of moderators for such diverse companies as NBCi, ATT, AARP, and Ace Hardware. Further extending his social media experience, Adam was an Account Development Manager for Open Text, a leading Enterprise 2.0 content management and social media software company for the past five years. This gives Adam a wide understanding of not only the processes and procedures for social media programs, but also a solid understanding of the technology requirements needed for success. Prior to Open Text, Adam worked for Participate.com as well. In his new role, Adam will help Impact Interactions with Business Development and consulting work.

Please join me in welcoming Lauren and Adam to our team.

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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

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2009 Trends — It’s Not All Doom & Gloom

It has been a very busy summer here at Impact Interactions. We’ve added more work with our existing clients like Cisco and SAP, added new clients, added more staff, launched a new small business service (Impact Social Media), and have received many more calls about our services. Taking a step back from the activity to analyze the social media/online community industry, we’re seeing the following trends emerge:

1. While enterprise level organizations are being very careful about spending money, there is a lot of interest in the social media area. We are seeing budgets freeing up, new projects starting and excitement about using social media to market products and services.
2. Enterprise online communities continue to launch at an amazing rate. We haven’t seen this type of growth in corporate sponsored B2B communities since 2000 when the concept was very new. The difference is that now there are third party sites like Twitter and YouTube to integrate into the communities.
3. Every one wants to avoid making mistakes, placing real best practices at a premium for enterprise companies. While there is always some learning by mistakes made in any venture, the companies we are dealing with always tell us that they want to avoid making the basic mistakes that others have made.
4. Analytics are at a premium, but not understood very well by some marketers running communities. We continue to see interest in base level metrics around traffic and basic engagement, but less understanding of value. Part of this is due to the over-reliance on Google Analytics as the main tool instead of a more powerful solution like Omniture. Google Analytics is a basic tool not a true enterprise level analytics tool in our opinion and experience.
5. In conjunction with number 4, we also see clients and prospects changing platforms in part due to poor reporting and administrative control pages. Many vendors seem to put reporting and analytics into their platform as an afterthought. Platform providers moving sharply ahead of the field in providing reporting and analytics for their software are Telligent, Lithium, and Jive to a certain degree.
6. Outsourced providers of social media expertise and management in areas such as moderation, social media monitoring, reporting, and integration are gaining more interest among enterprise level companies. With headcounts frozen or worse, organizations are looking outside their company for experienced help at an reasonable cost.
7. Lastly, the social media consulting industry remains very fractured. There are simply too many small businesses, individual consultants, and former software personnel chasing deals resulting in lower pricing and no concentration of expertise in a meaningful way. In other words, this industry is ripe for a consolidation play. This is what Jeff Dachis of the Dachis Corporation in Austin is slowly building towards. We think that there are multiple opportunities for consolidation and are actively looking for non-software companies to acquire or align with to gain a larger share of this growing market. (It’s only a matter of time before the big guys like Accenture, IBM, or big advertising agencies buy up the industry’s expertise to consolidate their market share.)

So far, 2009 has been far from the doom and gloom year that most were predicting in our industry. Certainly there has been some shakeout, but overall 2009 is shaping up as a really good year overall for social media and online community service companies.

Do you agree with these trends we’re seeing? What else are you seeing in our industry? Please share your comments below.

Mike Rowland, President

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Online Community – Understanding the Myths

Are You Blindly Following the “Wisdom of the Crowds” ?

Last year, we presented this topic at the Online Community Unconference in NYC to a standing room only crowd. It’s a fun topic, albeit one that elicits strong opinions and discussions. Whether you are an industry veteran or someone who is new to online communities and social media, this presentation can help you understand and avoid some of the classic mistakes being sold by the blogosphere and ‘gurus’ every day online. It’s available in our Social Media Resources area as a pdf that you can download.

For this month’s Online Community Unconference (June 10th in Mountain View, CA0, we are updating the presentation to cover even more myths that continue to gain a following despite impacting the results of communities and their teams. For example, are you using B2C thinking in your B2B community? Are you sure you need to be on third party platforms like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and others? What about metrics, are you confusing traffic with value? What role should volunteers play in your community?

These and other topics will be discussed in our talk. We hope that you’ll join us.

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The New Reality – What It Takes To Get Hired In Social Media

The economy is tough, but social media keeps growing. Impact Interactions is growing this year and once again is adding staff. We’re also trying to help those impacted by the economy and those coming right out of school to understand what working in social media is really like.

From our experience, here is what it takes to get hired:

• A focus on business skills like written communications, presentations, and statistics
• Understanding of how businesses operate from a financial perspective
• A basic understanding of Marketing, eCommerce, Advertising, and Sales
• Experience as a team member who’s used the power of collaboration to help everyone succeed
• A positive attitude
• A “relaxed” professional appearance (you know what business casual means)

Did you expect that?

Notice what’s missing?

That’s right, you do not have to be a Facebook addict or have 2,000 followers on Twitter or 500 connections on LinkedIn. You don’t have to know how to build a widget to update a user for when the top 20 members are on the site. If you use Tweetdeck, great. If you have no idea what it is, no problem.

Yet, when we give career talks, advice to job seekers, and interview our own candidates they focus on their Facebook or MySpace skill, the number of followers they have on Twitter, or what online community they use. What are we focused on? Simple, can the candidate learn our business while building strong relationships with our clients? Can the candidate make the client look good while understanding that he or she will be in the background?

Afterall, Social Media for all its wonderful claims of revolutionizing the world is really just another set of tools to increase the efficiency of business in meeting their goals. Direct mail, robo-calls, telemarketing, advertorials, infomercials, email campaigns, listservs, click-to-chat, click-to-call, and other marketing tactics helped businesses gain efficiency in their marketing efforts. Social Media is doing the same thing. The underlying principle is to use the correct tool set to engage your customers in a way that benefits both sides of the relationship. (It really is that simple.)

But you have to understand and like business for business sake. Because Social Media is not all about playing with the latest cool technology, it’s about getting results. No results equals no budget.

The great push right now is to find employees who can help companies understand social media and measure the results of their efforts. Think about every online community, web 2.0, or social media conference you’ve attended or read about… what is the one area that is always a topic of interest? Measurement and monetization.

Success in Social Media requires a focus on results, thinking strategically and executing tactics that achieve tangible results like additional sales, reduced marketing costs, faster velocity of sales, reduced lead generation costs, reduced support costs, etc. There are so many people who want to work in Social Media today, but few are willing to demonstrate their business acumen to get the position. We saw this in the late 1990s in the online community world, again in around 2003 with the blogosphere, and yet again in 2005 with the early social network companies. And here we are almost ten years later with the same issues.

So do you want to work in Social Media? My advice to you is brush up on your business skills first. Worry about your number of followers on Twitter later.

What do you think? What skills do you think it takes to work in Social Media?

Mike

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Online Community Unconference East 2009: The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same

At last week’s unconference, I noticed that many of the questions asked throughout the day repeated one another. Veterans in the online community world noted that the questions we are asking ourselves today seem to be the same ones that we have been asking for the last 10 years. One woman who had attended last year’s Online Community Unconference brought up an old expression to describe it, saying, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” I find this to be very true of the knowledge base in the online community industry. Even though communities and other social media are relatively new, their core elements are not so new at all. Online communities are just a new platform that allows people to build relationships and interact with each other, just like people have been doing since the dawn of time.

 

 

In order to really understand social media, you need to understand the social part of it. And while some people may tell you that the social part means just letting all of your members do whatever they want, I believe it is much deeper than that. It is about using our knowledge of human desires, feelings and behaviors in order to build a community in the truest sense. Successful “real world” communities don’t allow their members to do whatever they want, do they? To be successful, whether IRL (in real life) or online, communities need to have a specific purpose with regulations that help people to fulfill that purpose. Governments, school systems, the workplace, family, and friend groups all have specific functions and have guidelines (explicit or implied) that are built around fulfilling those functions. Prosperous online communities are no different. The people involved in online communities are the same people involved in outside communities. These people need structure, guidance, and freedom all balanced perfectly in order to make online communities as valuable as other communities and to make people want to be a part of them.

 

 

I found it very interesting when Scott Moore hosted a session called Psychology For The Community Manager. He took psychology principals on human behavior and analyzed them, explaining how these principles relate to behaviors in online communities as well. One example he gave was the Bystander Effect. This principle states that people are less willing to offer help to someone when others are present. This is because people tend to feel like someone else should be the one to do it, or because they fear that they will be judged on their actions and instead do nothing. Applied to online communities, Scott gave an example of how the degree of community moderator involvement can greatly affect the extent to which members help each other. If members feel like the moderators are ever-present and that they will do everything, then members are not as willing to solve their own or other people’s problems. The lesson here was that while your moderators are essential to communities, managers need to be aware of their impact on the member engagement and shape the community norms so that members will help each other to a reasonable extent and turn to moderators in advanced cases.

 

 

I am surprised that more people don’t connect the world’s knowledge of psychology and sociology to online community development. Oftentimes people who build online communities take the stance that social media is brand spanking new and that everybody is experimenting and learning everything from scratch. While there are aspects of social media which are a definite departure from many traditional corporate viewpoints, there is no need to start with a blank slate. That’s one of the reasons why people are always asking the same questions year after year. Instead, follow Newton’s lead and innovate by standing on the shoulders of giants. Utilize existing resources and tap into the knowledge of those who have been there before you. Then you’ll be years ahead of everyone else.

 

 

Jeremy Latimer

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Community Myth Busting – OCUE2009 Presentation Notes

This entry is a summary of a presentation we made at last week’s Online Community Unconference East meeting in NY. The session was attended by roughly 20-25 members and lead by our president, Mike Rowland.

The idea of the session was to drive discussions regarding many of the common ideas around community that have been published/promoted/blogged about as if they were absolutes rather than the experiences of a few. The topics covered the following:

1. 90-9-1 Rule- Comes from concept of Participation by Jakob Nielson. Worked pretty well in early 1990s when published. Major impacts on this idea have been adoption of online communities since 1990, broadband adoption, social networks, etc. We find that the numbers don’t hold and should not be relied upon in selling a project to management or in goal setting due to the wide variances we’ve measured with over 40 communities over the past eight years.
   - At Participate.com, we modified the rule to use as an outreach rule of thumb.
   - At Impact Interactions, our clients have ratios all over the map
   - It’s more important to measure the quality of interactions as it relates to your objectives instead of trying to work towards a specific ratio
2. Self-Policing Communities – Using volunteers to moderate and report violations is a hot trend for organizations to buy into right now. But it’s been that way since at least 2000 when we spoke of hyper-affiliates and enthusiasts. Our experience has shown that most community members cannot be relied upon to keep the community moving forward.
   - Volunteers will catch some violations, but mostly report content that they don’t agree with. This forces community team to review content twice or more which is inefficient
   - Volunteers are good at defensive work (spam, porn, etc.) but do not align with your organization’s objectives in most cases and won’t faciliate most B2C communities (B2B support communities, they usually will keep the conversations moving forward towards a resolution.)
   - Data in our presentation that we’ve been tracking each year for clients shows that members generally report about 20-30% of all violations in any given month. You still need moderation…
   - Our surveys of multiple community members (both B2B and B2C) over time shows that members don’t want to be classified as a tattle tail, nor do they believe it is their responsibility to keep the community free of junk, nor do they want to handle being attacked for removing or editing members’ content for violations.
3. Personas – There are strong feelings around this topic. The term authenticity comes up quite a bit when discussing personas when what is really meant is transparency.
   Great conversations on this one, with no conclusion reached about using personas or not.
   - Most personas get blown by members because the host creating the persona doesn’t think through the process and character, misuse the persona to cheerlead the organization and its products, is so unbelievable (master of health issues, political issues, computer technology, astrology, etc.), or is used to sell in the community. All of these are wrong and should be avoided.
   - Where personas work well is very, very limited. In new communities, personas can help seed conversational content and help demonstrate norms. In a flame war, they can help diffuse the situation (especially in the case of unjust attacks). Over time, as the community grows, the role of the persona should diminish.
4. Volunteers/Hyper-Affiliates as Good Guys – Beware the myth that your top people will always love and support your community.
   - The more volunteers/hyper-affiliates you have is not always a good metric
   - They don’t always follow the rules and have no objectivity
   - When a volunteer or hyper-affiliate turns against you, the result is a much larger confrontation than you might think.
   - Once enabled, it is very difficult to make changes to your site/community without a large time commitment to deal with the criticism of your volunteer network.
   - Letting volunteers and hyper-affiliates run the community demonstrates favoritism on the part of the host organization in the eyes of many non-recognized members. It is a double edged sword which if not carefully managed can have very negative consequences on your community’s conversion and engagement ratios.
5. Community ROI cannot be measured – Everyone is familiar with the cost avoidance argument to measure ROI. But after that, the conversation usually stops because the thought is that it is too hard to show the economic value of the community.
   - Don’t confuse value with ROI… they are not the same!
   - You can measure the economic value generated by your community using multiple data sources and methods. We’ve measured the online community ROI for sales (influence on purchase & intent), Marketing (awareness and loyalty), lead generation (development and qualify leads faster), and e-learning (higher achievement and registrations). They all require certain data that doesn’t come just from the community’s metrics.

We’ve uploaded the presentation as a pdf on our web site in our Social Media Resource Center.

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