Psychographics: Not just another buzzword

Way back when I was in college, I actually majored in electronic media production. Don’t confuse this with journalism. I enjoy writing but I wasn’t made for being in front of the camera. I’m far too shy and, frankly, too nerdy for that. I loved being behind the camera and working hands on behind the scenes. There are many skills that must be learned on the road to becoming adept at media production. We covered the physical aspects of production such as running a programmable audio board, working a camera switcher, and spending long hours doing non-linear editing in dark editing labs surrounded by half empty bags of chips and stacks of DV tapes. However, as we all know, media is so much more than the physical aspects of making it happen. We also spent a lot of time talking about the social side of being involved in media production. How does mass media affect society? How do the way scripts for news programs influence opinions? How do the colors we use in graphics lure or repel viewers and users? All of these minute details are vitally important and go way beyond simple statistics about audiences. We’ve all heard of demographics: race, gender, age, etc. But the statistics that really matter are actually not demographics but psychographics.

Now, the term psychographics might seem like some mumbo jumbo word that a marketing executive made up to sound smart. In reality, it’s far from some buzzword someone came up with on their way to a client meeting. Demographics represent what people are. They are finite and don’t change. You are the age you are even if your fake ID says otherwise. Nothing will change that. Psychographics, however, represent what people think and how they act. What kind of car do they drive? Do they drink soda? Do they like horror films or dramatic films? Are they calm and calculating or do they fly by the seat of their pants? All of these things are keys to understanding how media in all its forms affects people. That’s why psychographics are so much more powerful than demographics. A demographic doesn’t tell you much. Say you have two 30 year olds, Jim and Joe, from similar income households and who both hold advanced degrees. All of those are demographics. What do we know about these two people? Not much when you think about it. We know we can make generalizations about them because they are in the same groups. However, do we really know what makes them tick? Do we know what they like? Do we know what kind of communication they’re most likely to respond to? We can take a guess, but in the end, we really don’t know.

Now, let’s look at these two people using psychographics. Jim likes coffee in the morning, does the majority of his shopping online, is addicted to his smartphone, and currently drives a hybrid car. Joe has oatmeal for breakfast every morning while he reads his local newspaper. He also does the majority of shopping online but doesn’t use a smartphone and doesn’t like social media sites. He drives to work in a car with average gas mileage. Now what do we know about these two gentlemen? We now know a lot about them. Not to mention, the information we know about them is much more valuable. Demographically, they are equals. Psychographically, they are quite different.

This is why understanding your audience in BOTH areas is so important. Demographics will give you a more narrow audience. With demographics you are at least hitting the group of people the might be interested in you in the ways they may communicate the most. Using demographics, you get a good idea of where you can dig deeper with your information gathering. With psychographics, you have a target audience. You know how they communicate. You know they prefer Twitter over Facebook. You know they are on their smartphones and would potentially respond to an app or a Facebook interaction more than an email. You know that they are eco/health conscious based on the fact that they tend to buy more organic and fair trade products. These are the ever changing things that can make or break your social media campaign.

When planning any kind of interaction, whether it’s B2B, B2C, or even in a community environment, you can’t forget the “social” part of social media planning. It goes without saying that by truly understanding your customers and users, you can better understand your business. You can understand where your business is going and what kinds of changes or interactions your customers will approve of and respond to. It’s not just about connecting with the right age group or the right gender. It’s about connecting with the people who truly have the potential to make a difference to your bottom line. That’s why psychographics will always be much more than another mumbo jumbo buzzword.

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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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Executive Use of Social Media – A Collection of Research (Part 2)

In part one of the presentation, we focused on looking at the research that has come out during 2011 about social media for B2B companies and how you can use that research to understand how to use social media in your organization to solve your pain points. In part two, we’re going to look at several companies who are doing just that. Through published case studies and an example from Impact Interactions itself, we’ll see how you can utilize social media in a manner which generates real economic value to your firm. So let’s get started.

As always, should you have any questions or would like to comment, please do so below in the comments section.

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Management Efficiency – Using Dashboards for Executive Reporting



HI to all the readers of the Impact Interactions blog! My name is Robert Hu and I work at Impact Interactions as a manager of client services and I will be blogging about my experiences with how we manage social media and reporting.

We have been using tool called Xcelsius for almost 2 years now and it has worked wonders for all of our clients. No more 50 slide decks which no one ever read. With Xcelsius, we can now put all those charts, graphs, and other visuals that we had to repeat in the PowerPoint deck for each category into one simple visual which the user can filter to see what they are looking for. This not only saves so much time but also gives a more coherent story about what is going on with the social media strategy. Instead of putting 15 slides of the same line graph for each region, we can have just one graph the changes depending on which region the user selects.

Another benefit of a dashboard is that it can display data from multiple sources. As shown above from our dashboard, the data from traffic, behavior, value, and listening are all congregated into one simple view. This means that if you wanted to view the number of Twitter followers for this quarter you would click on the traffic tab. You can then go to the behavior tab and analyze how many of these followers are retweeting your content and finish by calculating the worth for all these tweets, followers, and retweets in the value tab. This process does not just apply to one social media tool, all of your social media offerings can be displayed in the dashboard which allows you a easy way to compare the results of each tool.

So you might be asking with all of these tools being displayed at once how do I compare the ones i want? The great thing about a dashboard is that you can filter out data that is important to you, therefore one dashboard can be distributed to multiple levels of management. The first screenshot shows a typical graph in a PowerPoint presentation, there are so many lines that it becomes confusing which competitor is doing better. But with the filters in a dashboard you can easily display only the competitors that you want to compare your company with which makes visualization of the data much easier.

Simplistic, versatile, and aesthetically pleasing, dashboards are the future of reporting and offer an enhanced way to view your data and make decisions from all your metrics.

Click here (flash required) and see for yourself on how a social media dashboard can look like and please let me know your thoughts on your own reporting experiences.

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Moving Beyond Counts & Traffic – Social Media Measurement That Works

Lots of interesting research coming out on Social Media recently. We take note because the results and conclusions continue to demonstrate that measurement remains a high priority for executives, but what is delivered is not meeting their needs. Let’s take a look at some recent examples of companies surveyed about their social media efforts from a measurement point of view.

First a study from White Horse of 104 companies using social media shows us that when companies try to measure the success of their social media efforts, that very few (less than 15%) are able to get to an ROI for their work. They continue to use traffic and participation (we put that in our behavior metrics) to demonstrate success.

Here is another study which demonstrates a similar point, that companies are using social media traffic and behavior metrics as a measurement of success. This study completed by King Fish Media in June 2010 has great information; unfortunately, it reveals that while many companies say that they have a social media strategy in place they don’t understand how to measure its results.

Perhaps it is the way the research is presented versus the actual question asked, but when you read the measurements used for value they are not representing economic value in most cases. Rather, marketers and others measuring social media continue to focus on representing traffic as some sort of proxy for value. Worse, many still believe that the number of followers on Twitter or fans on Facebook is a valuable metric to use to demonstrate value. They couldn’t be more wrong…

Even the famed Guy Kawasaki is promoting an idea that the more followers the better during a TweetChat on MarketingProfs…but his perspective is the larger the audience from a sheer numbers perspective the better your results will be. In our experience, that is just not true. We see that the more QUALIFIED followers you have, the better your results MIGHT be.Why? Because the value of a follower is zero until they do something that brings value to the organization. If all they are doing is following and never taking action, can you assign a value to them? We think not. Have you analyzed your followers? How many are customers? How many are prospects? How many are competitors? (How many have followed your account to simply build their own counts through an auto-follow?)

So where does all this lead? Well, if you are attending theiStrategy meeting in Chicago on September 15-16, we’ll be there to address this issue. I’ll be presenting this topic on the morning of the 16th to the attendees.

I’ll demonstrate a stronger methodology for using a more integrated approach to your social media efforts which allows you to focus only on the metrics that really matter… those that lead to economic value for your organization.

For those of you who cannot attend, the presentation will be added to our social media resource center after the meeting ends. For those of you who are attending, please bring your questions!

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Tracking Down Online Community ROI (Part 2: Business-Side Metrics)

by Matthew Lees

Part 1 looked at community-side metrics. This is the data you get from your community’s Web server log files, your community platform database, and any third-party analytics systems (such as Google Analytics or Omniture) that you’re using.

It’s also the data that you – as a business sponsor, community manager, or other stakeholder – likely have direct access to. And while it’s important information, it’s used primarily to help ensure the health of the community, not quantify and provide insight into business value. For that, you need to tap into business-side metrics.

Business-Side Metrics
These are the metrics that do show business value. Unfortunately, for most online community use cases, such data lives in places that you probably don’t have direct access to or control over. This is where the legwork and the relationship building that Mike Rowland referred to in the previous post come into play.

Where to look in your organization and who to build relationships with depends on what you’re after. Here are four common business cases for B2B communities, with an overview of their potential business value as well as mention of the relevant business-side metrics, location of these metrics, and people who can help you access and understand these metrics and what they mean for the bottom line.

1. Service and Support. Reducing contact center costs is one of the primary business goals of a community in which customers help answer each others’ questions and solve each others’ problems (via what’s often called “peer-to-peer support”).
Business-side metrics: number of incidents (by source, e.g., phone, email, chat, etc.), first-contact resolution, agent hours
Where the metrics live: contact center analytics system
Who to make friends with: not only the VP of Support, but also the manager who is the most fluent with the call center’s reporting and analytics

2. Product Development Feature Set and Road Map. Here you’re probably looking for (a) ideas for new products and services, (b) ideas for new features and functionality, (c) ideas around improving customer-facing processes (i.e., making it easier for customers to do business with you), and (d) the prioritization of these ideas. These ideas and their prioritization by customers can improve processes, reduce time to market, and give you higher confidence that your product road map is what your customers want.
Business-side metrics: number of customer ideas that are implemented; number of existing ideas that were validated by customers; time to market; dollar value of reduced time to market (can be a squishy number)
Where the metrics live: product tracking system; business process systems (ideally these all track the sources of ideas)
Who to make friends with: product development / R&D teams, particularly the keepers of the road map and features/capabilities lists

3. Customer Acquisition and Lead Generation. Communities are a great way for people to go beyond what they read on your Web site and in your marketing collateral, to get a sense of how people are using your products in the real world. So prospects are part of the community ecosystem as well as existing customers. A vibrant community full of helpful, engaged customers can be effective in moving prospects into your sales pipeline.
Business-side metrics: number of new accounts that came in through the community, new revenue from these accounts
Where the metrics live: CRM system or other sales tracking application
Who to make friends with: the sales team, particularly the sales operations manager who tracks sourcing

4. Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty. Numerous studies have shown that online communities can have a positive affect on customer satisfaction and loyalty. The tricky thing in demonstrating this for your own community is to separate out cause and effect. Communities can be self-selecting; your most satisfied and loyal customers are probably over-represented in your community. For them, the community didn’t cause their high level of satisfaction, for example. Any surveys you do to measure satisfaction and loyalty should take this into consideration.
Business-side metrics: survey results; customer satisfaction / loyalty methodology or system, such as Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Where the metrics live: survey results database; satisfaction, loyalty system
Who to make friends with: the marketing specialist who measures customer satisfaction and loyalty for your organization

Legwork and Relationship Building
You may have noticed that the business-side metrics are really just the ones that your organization and your colleagues are already using to identify and analyze business value. You’re just looking to apply and tune them towards quantifying their impact from the community.

Of course, while the methods may be familiar, it isn’t necessarily easy to compile metrics and estimate dollars saved and/or generated. A lot of it comes down to doing the legwork and building relationships with the right people. Ideally determining community ROI is at the top of their priority list as well as yours. It will take time and attention to come up with ROI hypotheses, test them using data you’ve tracked down from wherever it lives, analyze the results, revise your hypotheses accordingly, and iterate. Hopefully your colleagues become partners in these efforts.

So how do you build these relationships, make those allies, and get the information you need? We’ll leave that for another day. But experience shows that chocolate helps…

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Social Media Metrics – Driving to Value

We’re members of the Online Community Research Network and recently received the latest report on Community Metrics derived from a survey of the membership. While we’re happy to see a lot of progress in the responses about tying measurement to business objectives, we continue to see confusion about measuring value. Over the past ten years, we’ve developed a methodology that can help online community and social media managers structure their reporting in order to focus on the value their efforts produce in terms of business objectives.

Looking  at the report’s question #12 (Were your community’s metrics created in support of your organization’s broader business goals or were they created independent of a corporate business?), the following responses were given:

• 47% Created to support existing business goals
• 31% Created independently but helping refine existing business goals
• 22% Neither of the above (summarized from three additional responses)

Looking at what metrics the respondents use to support or refine existing business goals provides insight into the confusion over what constitutes value in online community and social media efforts.

Question 19 asked “What are the three most important community key performance indicators (KPIs) in the reports you send to upper level management?” The answers are a startling contrast to the answers to Question 12:

1. Number of Page Views or Clicks
2. Number of Site Visits
3. Number of Unique Visits

Why are these responses startling? Because the metrics are traffic metrics not value metrics. These are base level metrics not KPI worthy metrics for upper level managers. (In fact, three of the top five metrics measured as detailed in an earlier question were traffic metrics too: Unique Visitors, Page Views, and Visitors. Only two were not: Registrations and Posts.)

What these two questions’ responses demonstrate is that the respondents are still struggling with determining value from their community work that truly builds into measurable business objectives.

When asked about ROI, 71% of respondents confused engagement and traffic metrics with value. Only 29% correctly identified a tangible value metric to use in measuring ROI.

To provide a little clarity in reporting metrics, let’s look at how Impact Interactions’ reporting methodology can help. First, our categories are structured as follows:

• Traffic - The basic building blocks that measure “How Many?”
• Behavior – The second level of metrics measuring conversion and engagement
• Value – The highest level of community metric where the activity has an economic or dollar value associated with it (This is what management really cares about!)

Some of the actual metrics that we use for clients are as follows:

1. Traffic - Unique Visits, Unique Visitors, Page Views, etc.
2. Behavior- Page Views/Unique Visit, Page Views/Unique Visitor, Active Members/Unique Visitors, New Registrations/New Unique Visitors, Total Registrations/Total Unique Visitors, Downloads/Registered Member, Content Added/Registered Member, Content Added/Unique Visitor, Downloads/Unique Visits, Full profiles completed, Referrals from Twitter/Facebook/YouTube, etc.
3. Value – Number of successful customer support resolutions in the community, Total Contact Sales Inquiries/ Total Unique Visitors (or Registered Members), Total Leads Qualified/Generated, Product Referrals, Positive Product Reviews as a % of Total Product Reviews, Direct Revenue Generated from Community Activities, Length of Sales Cycle for community member vs non-member, Average Purchase Size/Frequency for community member vs non-member, etc.

Take a look at those metrics again. The first two categories of Traffic and Behavior can usually be obtained using the platform’s tools (like Jive, Telligent, or Lithium) or through your web analytics’ tools (like Google Analytics, Omniture, or WebTrends). The Value metrics take a little more work. In fact, to really be able to perform a realistic ROI calculation, you will need to get help from outside the community/social media area of your organization.

To derive an ROI related to marketing objectives from a community, you’ll need to access your CRM system. For a support ROI, you’ll need to know the cost per interaction in complementary/competitive areas such as a call center. The standard tools won’t get you there, you’ll have to build relationships within your organization in order to really build a solid analysis that ties back to business objectives. An ROI model built on traffic will contain far too many holes to be useful.

We’ve been helping our clients with these issues and have developed a strong set of best practices that can help you succeed in your reporting. Please feel free to share your insights into this issue and ask questions about reporting and analyzing your community and social media efforts. We’re happy to answer them and help reduce the confusion.

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Online Community – Moving Beyond Metrics to ROI

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

Here are the summary notes taken during the session:

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

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

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

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

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

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B2B Communities – What Works

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

Top Best Practices for B2B Communities:

1. B2B Community Members have higher expectations than B2C members. You must engage with them as they want to engage with your company just as much as they want to engage with their peers.
2. B2B Communities require internal SMEs to engage early and remain committed to meeting member needs until external SMEs can compliment the internal SME efforts.
3. Third party applications like Twitter and Facebook should not be used as external competitive communities, but rather should be utilized as beacons to drive traffic to your community and key information.
4. You can measure the ROI for B2B communities, but you cannot get there by using only community software metrics and/or web analytics packages like Omniture or Google Analytics. None of these provide true value metrics that have an economic value associated with them. To get to ROI, you must build relationships within your organization so you can obtain real data on customers, leads, ecommerce transactions, etc.
5. When budgeting for B2B communities, be realistic. For example, no single vendor of software or web design or implementation services will ever come in exactly where they quote when you want additional features or customization. So build a small cushion into your budget to be safe.
6. To attract business decision makers, you must focus on how they will use the site… not how you want to market to them.
7. The higher the level within an organization your potential members have attained, the lower the amount of time they will have to spend on your site. So don’t waste their time!

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

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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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