Notes from the Online Community Unconference East 2010

By Matthew Lees

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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It’s Not About You: Where Organizations Miss the Boat on Social Media

By Matthew Lees

Way back when (in the 80’s, perhaps?) I remember watching a stand-up comedian do a funny and perceptive routine on how magazine titles had changed over the years to reflect important changes in society. I’m paraphrasing — the old memory chips aren’t as good as they used to be — but here’s the gist:

Early on, there was a magazine called “Life.” It was pretty much about everything.

Later, someone came up with a magazine didn’t have such high aspirations, but still looked to include a large portion of what life is about. It was called “People.”

Apparently that wasn’t specific enough. So a new magazine hit the market: “Us.” It wasn’t about all people. Just some people. Not those people, of course. Us people.

Guess what! Even that was too broad. Who wants to know about Us? That still covers too much ground. Much better to focus on what’s really important. So what do we get? The magazine “Self.”

What’s next? Maybe they’ll just sell mirrors in the shape of magazines, so you can just stare at your own reflection.

There are times it seems the social Web is going down a similar path, where it’s all about “You.” What You’re doing. Who You know. Who knows You. What You sell. (And many of the times where it’s ostensibly not about You, it really is. Kind of like the old joke about the egotist, “So enough about me. How do you like my tie?”)

But what I’m really talking about here is organizations, not individuals. It’s You, the company, not You the person, who’s largely missing the boat on social media.

OK, I admit (happily) that it’s not really all about You out there. This is demonstrated by the organizations that support their own online communities, and engage on social networks in transparent, conversational, collaborative ways. And, yes, it’s appropriate for some things to indeed be about You: customers and prospective customers do want to know about Your businesses, how Your products and services can help them, and how and why You’re the best in the business; and members want to know about Your associations, and how You are helping those You’re supposed to help.

But social technologies sure make it easy to make it about You.

Yet the organizations that successfully leverage social media are the ones that don’t go this route. They’re the ones that make it about Them. Who’s Them? They’re your customers (or users, members, subscribers, readers, business partners, employees, or whatever audience is relevant and whatever terminology you prefer).

So how do you make it about Them? Here are some thoughts:

• Take Their Viewpoints and Ideas into Account. Crowdsourcing is a great way to make it about Them. Today’s technologies make it relatively easy to run a crowdsourcing program that gives Them a place not only to give you their ideas for making your business better, but also to vote on and rank each others’ ideas. The outcome is that the best and most feasible ideas bubble to the top, ready for you to take the actions that are most important to Them.

• Support What They Care About. Hard as it may seem to believe, They are interested in more than just your company, your products, and your services. So don’t just talk about your stuff; add some value related to the other things they care about. You can do this by blogging about trends you see in your industry, sponsoring an online community where They can to talk with, connect with, and learn from each other, and tweeting fast-breaking information that’s timely and relevant to what’s important to Them.

• Make Them the Center of Attention. I remember an interesting networking tip. It suggested that you bring other people with you to networking events. In particular, bring someone who is looking for something new, such as a new job or new business. When the two of you are there, don’t talk about yourself. Act almost as if you’re your friend’s agent. Introduce her to other people, highlight what she’s good at; turn conversations towards her. You’ll be seen as a connector, and as someone who goes out of his way to help others. So your own networking stock will rise, not by blowing your own horn, but by making someone else look good. Extending this to social media means retweeting good stuff your followers say, spotlighting your customers on your Web site, asking them to share their stories on your blogs, and helping them “strut their stuff” (as Patty Seybold would say) on your online community.

The promise of social media is that, when we’re all engaged and communicating with each other, all boats rise. You are part of that equation, but so are They.

How are you making it about Them?

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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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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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Why Does Everyone Believe Community ROI Is So Hard To Measure?

Just finished reading Jeremiah Owyang’s blog on ROI for online communities and social media. The entry is here. Jeremiah’s suggestions are accurate and some of the comments from our colleagues are really helpful. Here is our commentary which we’ve also posted on Jeremiah’s blog:

What I find interesting about this topic is the general disagreement of the relevance of ROI in the discussions of community and social media experts. We’ve attended events, webinars, and industry meetings, where people were unclear or downplayed the importance of this measure for social media and communities. Others in the Social Media space blog frequently that ROI is either tough to do or not relevant.

At Impact Interactions, we believe that ROI is a crucial element of the community building and management process. You must start building your framework before the community even launches, then refine it over time. But you cannot use just the metrics from your community, you must align them with additional data from within the organization (CRM records for B2B for example).

For B2B support clients, we measure technical questions answered by members as a cost avoidance measure to demonstrate the scalability of the community versus call center costs. We supplement it with survey data on customer satisfaction, purchase influence, and information utility. It all adds up to a large ROI.

For a marketing focused B2B community, we built a framework that demonstrated the influence that the community had in influencing sales of multi-million dollar contracts. We mined the transactional data and compared it with the CRM records to develop a pattern of influence on sales velocity, lead generation, and sales.

For a B2C automotive parts company, we compared sales transactions from the companies e-commerce database with community transactions to find the ROI for the community. It also reinforced the powerful notion that community members were buying more frequently than non-community members and that each purchase transaction was larger than those of non-community members.

For a B2C subscription based service, at Participate.com we demonstrated that community members churned at a rate 50% lower than non-community members, resulting in millions of dollars of revenue and profits.

Each of these clients had an ROI on their community of over 100% once their communities scaled.

It is not hard to develop the ROI framework, but it does take time and relationships within the organization to get the appropriate data. If you are a community manager, you need to build a network outside of the community area in your organization in order to align the community’s analytics with your organization’s focus and goals. Only then will you be able to tap into CRM or e-commerce databases to validate your framework.

We have some basics on B2B ROI in presentations available for free in our Social Media Resource Center on our website. Please feel free to visit and download the presentations. In our introductory deck on Impact Interactions, we have quotes from Cisco, Mercury Interactive, and ATT on their ROI from their online community efforts. Here is the link: http://www.impactinteractions.com/social-media-resource-center.html

What Jeremiah has posted is absolutely spot on. But is up to you as a community manager to act. In this environment, you cannot afford to have your community (and job) viewed as a soft application that doesn’t produce tangible, measurable results. If you’d like to learn more, please contact us.

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Beware the 90%-9%-1% Myth of Community Participation

Over the past year or two, it has been very fashionable for social media consultants to push the 90%-9%-1% community participation breakdown as the benchmark for all communities to reach or surpass. We’ve seen this statement be presented at the Community2.0 conferences, Forum One’s community conferences, in blogs, and now in a new site 90-9-1.com. While we do not doubt the sincerity of our competition in trying to develop a benchmark that is easy to remember and use, we do have an issue with this one.

Let’s start with the generalization across all communities and social media. Do active blogs and wikis really have 1% superusers and 9% active users who are adding content? I doubt it. Take out the company sponsor/employee who is employed to maintain the blog or wiki and the numbers drop in a big way. Most of the blogs we’ve seen metrics on in the B2B space have a ratio closer to 99-.9-.1. That’s a lot less than the ‘benchmark’ being touted as the industry standard. Go to any of the major blogs whose audiences are the high users of social media like AllThingsD or TechCrunch to see how low these ratios actually are. I don’t have the metrics, but a casual glance reveals that even at TechCrunch, the ratio is closer to the 99-.9-.1 than 90-9-1.

What about online communities? There again, the ratios are dependent upon the purpose of the community. With most community consultants failing to distinguish between a B2B and a B2C community, most advice provided is based upon B2C communities. But that is a major mistake. B2B communities are very different than B2C in terms of function, objectives, members, and participation. In our experience managing and measuring many B2B communities, the participation results are all over the map. One client offers an open B2B technology community with a ratio of 70-25-5. A previous client offers a closed B2B support community that achieved a ratio of 60-30-10. Another B2B client had a ratio of 98-1.9-.1.

Even the B2C communities we’ve managed have a different ratio based upon their targeted audience. AARP’s online community (that we are managing) currently has a ratio closer to 99.9-.07-.03. Using the myth of 90-9-1, this community would be considered a failure. But with a membership of over 800,000 new members in the past year and the demonstrated success in meeting the organization’s online goals, it is far from a failure.

Why is there a difference between what we are seeing and the myth of 90-9-1? Our experience has proven to us that there is no magic number to reach for when building and managing your community. Rather, the results are dependent upon several factors:

1. What are the demographics of your audience? Older audiences read more, participate less (with the exception of political communities and blogs). Male dominated audiences tend to participate at higher rates than female dominated audiences with the caveat that men usually try to dominate the participation in mixed audiences. Audiences who are more comfortable with technology will usually have higher participation rates than non-technology audiences.
2. What is the focus of your community? Support communities have much higher participation rates than any other type of community we’ve measured. General entertainment communities without a purpose usually spike, but then show declines in participation as they age (usually due to dominant members who use the community as their bully pulpit).
3. Are you B2B focused or B2C focused? B2B communities should have higher participation levels because members come to find information and build relationships with the company offering the community. If they find what they want, they return. A well run, facilitated B2B community will bring members back again and again.
4. What level of outreach and marketing are you performing? Unless your community becomes the next viral success, your participation rates are directly related to the amount of success you have in marketing your community.
5. How engaged is your organization in the community? In B2B communities, the higher the engagement of your employees, the more members will participate. In B2C communities, the moderators must be visible, yet not play in the community as members. They are the referees. When B2C moderators become too friendly with members in a community, new members see favoritism not balance. They then have a disincentive to participate.
6. How much content is available? Without content, there isn’t much to discuss.
7. Does your organization practice the “If we build it, they will come” method for managing communities? If so, your participation rates are doomed to be low (as will your conversion and other engagement rates). You must actively manage your community. We recommend personas as well as employees to demonstrate desired community norms and to establish the member to member interactions model for the community.

If you’ve read down this far, hopefully you’ll agree that the 90-9-1 ratio is a myth not reality. Where is your community with regards to this ratio? Does it matter? Not really.

What does matter is what are the measurable results for your community or social media offering. Are members getting what they need? Is that successful interaction benefiting your organization? These are the questions that are important, not a ratio.

We’ve helped many organizations achieve stronger results with their social media projects than they thought possible. We have created the best practices for B2B and B2C efforts that can help meet both the needs of your audience and your organization. We’d be happy to help your organization move beyond basic social media tactics to a more strategic method to engage members and achieve business results. To learn more, please contact us.

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