#EPICFAIL – Lessons in PR disasters

When playing ostrich with your social media just makes things worse.

My husband is a runner (I sometimes run…right before having an asthma attack). He’s big into 5K races and is working his way up to 10K races and half marathons. Last year he very eagerly registered for a popular run taking place in the Washington, DC area. He thought it would be a great event being that we could all fly in, see his family, and maybe even cheer him on as he crossed the finish line. Fun for everyone, right?!

As the race got closer, things got weirder. You couldn’t park close to the race event unless you were riding with other racers. If you wanted to go to the race as a spectator, you had to go to a public transit station far away from the race location and then take a shuttle. The course was planned along a narrow route, part of which was on a highway. It went on and on and on. But, this post isn’t about the race and the ensuing race day debacle. It’s the social media debacle after the race debacle that’s the real story.

Turns out the race was so poorly organized that a Facebook page was started DURING the race about how bad it was. Over 1,000 people have liked this page to date. It’s a small percentage of the 22,000 that showed up to race but anytime a Facebook page about something like a 5K race gets that much traction, you know it’s bad. Here’s where the fun begins. Angry racers began posting comment after comment on this page about how bad the race was. From alleged dangerous conditions to sub-par goodie bags, it was clear racers were incensed. They didn’t keep their rage contained to the fail page either. They also made sure that the organizers knew how they felt on the event’s Facebook page. They left hundreds of comments blasting the race. Some were even demanding a refund of their registration fee. And what was the response from the organizers? Nothing. Not one comment was responded to within the comments section. Going further, users began accusing the organizers of deleting comments and one user (who started the fail page) was supposedly blocked from the event Facebook page. The day after the event an official apology was posted and promptly met with angry comments from disappointed runners and silence from the organizers (although they did manage to update their rules about what kind of posts would be deleted). Three days after that a second apology was posted with the exact same response.

If you look at the race’s Facebook page now, there still has never been any acknowledgement of the problems that runners mentioned in their comments. Instead, organizers state in their About page that any complaints could be sent to their customer support email address or they could call the customer support hotline. Note that I said it’s on their “About” page. None of that was mentioned on their main Facebook page. This, friends, is what is called “playing ostrich.” If you pretend it isn’t there, it never really happened. Rather than taking the opportunity to use their Facebook page as a way to sincerely connect with the consumers who paid a good chunk of change to be in the “race” they ignored their criticisms. Their lack of response was so bad that even the event sponsor threw them under the bus by releasing a statement voicing their disappointment.

So what can be learned here? Personally, I think the lesson to be learned is that ignoring what your audience is saying is tantamount to brushing them off and no one likes being brushed off. More and more, people are foregoing the informational vacuums of hotlines and customer support email accounts and going straight to the source: your Facebook page. This is a change that cannot be ignored. Companies can’t pretend it’s not there. People are going to say bad things about your company and it’s easier than ever to do so very publicly. The other thing they can’t ignore is the idea that those negative comments will be contained to the comments section of the wall posting. With the recent changes in Facebook’s layout, users can readily see not only what their friends are saying but what the friends of their friends are saying by way of the scrolling feed on the right hand side of everyone’s profile. It’s like a Clairol commercial gone bad.

The answer to this situation is so simple. Respond. You can’t respond to everyone in a media crisis but you can do more than post and run. Take the time to reach out in a place where others can see you doing it. They need to see the olive branch being handed out. Even if you can’t offer compensation, the least you can do is spend some time responding to those comments. If you look at companies that have the highest customer satisfaction rates and loyalty, you will also see that they are masters at responding. There’s no posting and running. If they see a critical comment, they take notice and they make sure that everyone else who saw that comment sees their response.

By playing ostrich this company was met with a giant PR nightmare. Angry comments, a Facebook page dedicated to them dropping the ball, a petition with people vowing to boycott any future races, complaints to the BBB, and a slew of nasty articles in local papers. Ouch. Let this be an example to all those who think their social media pages are just there for information. They aren’t. They are a voice for your consumers and your consumers will let you know when they’re madder than a snake that’s just been stepped on. They WILL turn on you. The question is will you be able to stop them?

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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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Branded Communities Are Doomed? Not so fast.

By: Miranda Young, September 30, 2011

Engaging your audience isn’t always an easy task and in times like these, when everything has to be monetized, it’s easy to get scared off by the seeming inability to truly measure the value of your online community. To some, online communities really don’t earn their keep or are really only there to preach to the already existing choir of users.  In our experience, this couldn’t be further from the truth.  Online communities can be both the lifeblood of an organization as well as a platform to attract those ever elusive new users/consumers. We’ve helped several major organizations grow their online communities into vital repositories of information, communication, and conversation.  Not only that, we’ve seen these communities facilitate huge ROIs for their brand.

Richard Millington, founder of the UK based Fever Bee Community Consultancy, recently wrote an article titled “Why Branded Online Communities Are Doomed.”  Some of what he wrote has merit, but, in our view, a lot of it doesn’t because we’ve personally seen the opposite happen.

Communities CAN be an important source of revenue

“At the moment, most branded community efforts fail. Few attract more than a handful of active participants. Even those that succeed, barely deliver the ROI they promised.” -  Richard Millington

While this may be true of some online communities, blanket statements about their ability to both attract active participants and deliver the ROI they promised is patently false. We helped NetApp build their online community which has gone on to produce over half a billion (yes, billion) dollars in partner owned sales revenue. Cisco has seen a ROI of over 100% from their online community.  And there are other companies all over the country and around the globe that are seeing direct monetary benefits come out of their online communities.  Whether it’s through direct sales coming out of those communities or greater brand awareness, over all, B2B and B2C communities can and do work.

Communities aren’t just for loyal customers

“If you’re trying to reach new audiences, a community is the wrong choice. Why would people join a community for a product/service they don’t buy?” - Richard Millington

Again, this is not what we’ve experienced in our many years of helping companies build out their online communities.  If you’re trying to reach a new audience communities can be one of the BEST places to turn to.  When reading that question, we ask the question back “Why would someone buy a product that they haven’t asked other people, people who are already users, about.”  Communities are where they can get their questions answered and it’s someplace where, once they do become a user, they can return to.  They know the community will be there to help them and having a robust, active community there for your prospective customers is a benefit rather than a waste as Mr. Millington would have you believe.  Not only that, often times these communities help stave off customer support calls by answering questions within the community.  This, in turn, saves the company money and also builds quality relationships among new and loyal users.  Those new users will look to the community as a source of information and turn into loyal users resulting in even more revenue as they continue to buy more products and support your brand through word of mouth advertising.

Size matters but it can’t be one size fits all

“Communities don’t need a big launch, they need a small launch…They need very high levels of personal contact. They need to be directly invited. Most importantly, they need to be prompted for the first few weeks to participate in discussions.” -   Richard Millington

Yes and no. Mr. Millington is right that companies need to focus on nurturing their communities and even help guide the conversations sometimes, but that doesn’t mean that the community as a whole can’t be big at launch.  Directly inviting members isn’t going to get you far when it comes to building your community. We have found that only 3-5% of all invited users or users who find the community feature will go deeper than one page into the new community.  Even then, only 15-20% of those will actually stay long enough to come to their own opinion about what you’re offering and only a few of those will actually post anything. We prefer to advise our clients to look across their entire audience for places where users share interests and create a larger group of members and visitors that can interact with the community from that.  The size of the “starter” community should be based upon a percentage of your entire audience not a finite number of 50-100 as Mr. Millington suggests.

Communities are here to stay

“We need to understand that communities take time, but it’s an investment which pays off many times over.” -  Richard Millington

Now this is something we can all agree on. Communities take time but, like Mr. Millington says, it’s an investment which will pay off in the end.  Done right, online communities can be the keystone of your overall communication plan. We’ve seen them be successful time and time again. Online communities are far from doomed.  We’ve seen quite the opposite.  They can and do have measureable monetary and social effects on both new and loyal users and they are a powerful tool in your arsenal of social media tactics.

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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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Upcoming Event – Social Media Best Practices for B2B Communicators, San Jose CA, May 4-5 2011

Impact Interactions’ president Mike Rowland to present “Ten Years in the B2B Trenches: A Practioner’s Guide to Maximizing the Return on Your Community” at Social Media Best Practices for B2B Communicators Conference, May 4, 2011 in San Jose, CA.

How many online communities really succeed at meeting their objectives? Does yours? Online communities are proven tools for expanding the conversation with your customers, prospects, and fans. Whether you are looking to reduce your support costs, generate leads, nurture customer relationships, or build awareness for your products, online communities require a clear purpose and processes to deliver results. Managed properly, online communities can deliver a stunning ROI that will impress even the most jaded executive. Drawing upon ten years of experience and examples from Cisco, NetApp, SAP, Ace Hardware, Intel, and others, Mike Rowland will discuss many of the best practices and issues that impact online community success (including how to use social media with your community). This three hour session will help attendees to understand the best practices for building, managing, and measuring a focused B2B online community. The last hour of the session will be dedicated to answering your questions utilizing a panel of top B2B community management executives from Impact Interactions’ client teams. To learn more about this great B2B focused event, please click here.

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Who Needs It? Dealing with Unwanted Content and Conversations in Your Online Community

by Matthew Lees

Every day seems to bring increased buy-in and understanding of how social media and online communities can positively impact organizations. But there’s still pushback around certain things. For example, community platform vendors, consulting firms, and agencies still regularly hear concerns such as “What if someone uses profanity?” and “What if they say bad things about us?”

Most of the content in your community – and throughout the social Web, too – is stuff you want. These are the questions and answers your community members share with each other and with you. They’re their problems and solutions, their interesting and relevant comments (even their uninteresting and relevant comments), their ideas, wish lists, and perspectives.

But there will also be things that you really don’t want, the content and conversations that you and the community could surely do without.

These things should make up a small percentage of the overall content, but it’s all but impossible to avoid them completely. (You’ll typically find a smaller percentage of unwanted posts in B2B communities than in B2C communities, and you’ll usually see a smaller percentage of such things in support-related communities than in affinity and engagement communities.)

Thanks But No Thanks
To be more specific, the unwanted stuff is posts and content that contain…

1. Inappropriate Language or Content. No surprise here…these are comments, images, or videos of a sexual, violent, abusive, or otherwise inappropriate nature. Note that this is about more than the use of foul language. There are a lot of mean and nasty things that can be said with perfectly acceptable words.
2. Advertising or Spam. Some advertising may be fine in your community. Often, though, it’s not. And I can’t think of a situation in which any community would want spam. (Is there a Spam community? If so, that would prove me wrong.)
3. Incorrect Information. You can’t fully control the quality of user-generated answers, solutions, and comments. Members will, on occasion, post information that’s incorrect. Usually it’s unintentional, but it can cause confusion or worse. Blatantly incorrect info is relatively easily fixable; gray areas can lead to disagreement, dissent, and (hopefully) healthy discussion.
4. Sensitive or Confidential Information. Some customers often have access to inside information, as do your colleagues, of course. If people aren’t careful, or if there’s miscommunication on when and where certain information can be shared, they can inadvertently say things they shouldn’t. This doesn’t happen often, but the cat does sometimes get out of the bag.
5. Off-Topic Comments. Such posts may be benign, but they’re either entirely irrelevant or relevant to another place in the community.

There are also a few types of posts that some may see as unwanted. But community managers and moderators worth their salt see these as acceptable, if not desirable (at least in low volume), since they demonstrate transparency and authenticity, and give community members opportunities to chime in on your behalf. These are post that…

•    Say Negative Things about Your Organization, Brand, Products, Services, etc.
•    Say Positive Things about the Competition

Be Prepared
So how do you deal with all these situations? Best is to have your ducks in a row beforehand. Here are some suggestions:

•    Have a good moderation plan, and a great community manager and moderation team. When dealing with unwanted content and conversations, moderators should be observant, understanding, firm, and fair. And know what you’ll do when you get each type of unwanted post.
•    Create appropriate community policies and guidelines, not only for community members, but for subject-matter experts and other internal stakeholders and participants.
•    Make friends with colleagues throughout your organization. It’s worthwhile, if not essential, to check in with the folks in legal, corporate communications, and pretty much all other business units. They can help with the Action Plan items that pertain to them, and help deal with unexpected things should they arise.
•    Have a library of stock replies at your disposal. This will help you respond to issues quickly.
•    Leverage the tools in your community platform. The moderation tools and accompanying workflow are important here, of course. I’m a big fan of content filters (for catching obscenities and other text strings) that trigger email notifications. And the ability to enable or disable anonymous posts can be helpful, as well, since people tend to take more liberties when they can participate anonymously.
•    Be aware. Be very aware. Technology won’t catch everything. There’s no substitute for paying attention.

Most online community best practices deal with how to engage with community members and get more of the good stuff. Knowing how to minimize and deal with the unwanted stuff is important, too.

And the best way to assuage execs’ concerns is to say “Yes, there will be some amount of unwanted and inappropriate content and conversations in the community. We can’t avoid that. But here’s how we’ll be handling them when they do arise…”

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Will Employee Communities and Customer Communities Converge? (Part 4)

by Matthew Lees

In this fourth and final post on the potential for convergence between Internal and External communities – see Post #1 to start at the beginning – I want to touch on the individuals who are charged with building and managing communities, whether communities of employees or communities of customers.

The Practitioner Perspective
We’re still in the very early days of social software and online communities. Practitioners are the ones at the forefront of this field, which is at the interaction of sociology, technology, and business. And they’re breaking ground daily.

They’re the knowledge management strategists who think about ways of getting colleagues to collaborate more openly; they’re the HR professionals who want to retain top talent by ensuring all voices are not only heard, but also help shape what’s important within the organization; they’re the community managers and moderators who work to get customers to support and learn from each other; they’re the marketers monitoring brand value and customer sentiment across the social Web; and they’re the marketers, developers and researchers who look to engage with customers (and prospective customers) and glean insights in order to innovate and improve.

What they’re not, though, is omniscient. Because social practitioners are working in such a new space, success is a moving target. They don’t know – they can’t know – what things will be like in six months, in a year, or in five years. The guidelines, benchmarks, and best practices are largely still being created every day. Sure, some organizations and vendors are ahead of others, and there’s a lot that (happily) is known and at least somewhat agreed upon, but compared to more traditional disciplines, there are few, if any, codified bodies of knowledge.

Pulled in Multiple Directions
What this means is that it’s tough enough being a social media practitioner in the first place, let alone trying to work in multiple domains, specifically internal and external. Some of the tools and techniques involved in building, managing, and getting the most out of a community apply to both internal and external communities…but many don’t. And, as Post 2 touched on, the business goals are very different.

Last month I wrote about a practitioner in a marketing communications group whose B2B online customer community initiative was sidetracked into becoming an internal collaboration-based community. She was caught in a tug of war between the internally focused IT team and the outward-looking marketing group, with execs on both sides knowing they needed her social media expertise, but not realizing how vastly different their business goals were.

And she’s not the only one in this predicament.

The Downside of Employee Community and Customer Community Convergence
For practitioners, the downside of such convergence is the potential for being pulled unwillingly and/or unexpectedly into initiatives that you’re unprepared for, unsuited for, or uninterested in. It’s nice to ride the excitement of the social media wave, and to be appreciated and in demand for one’s expertise. But the excitement can easily turn to frustration. Here are some things to keep in mind:

•    Bring it back to business goals and business use cases. You may need to hammer on this over and over. It’s a big red flag if business sponsors are unclear on the business goals, or not in agreement with each other.
•    Make sure the technology platforms under consideration fit these use cases. Only a handful claim to support both internal and external communities, and they don’t necessarily do both things equally well.
•    Stay true to yourself. Boy, does that sound corny, but I’ve seen more than a few people take on something they knew they were ill-suited for, uninterested in, and/or knew things wouldn’t end well. It’s a good thing — really, an essential thing — to challenge yourself by going outside your comfort zone, but do this with your eyes open. And if you know it’s not right, try not to go there.

The Road Ahead
While I fully resonate with the holy-grail concept of having a single ecosystem in which both employees and customers participate, the realities of organizational behavior, social dynamics, and technology limitations will preclude this from happening on any sizable scale. Some organizations will continue to move in this direction, and some vendors will support them, but for the most part, inside will remain inside, and outside will remain outside.

The good news, though, is that while this wall will continue to stand, it will continue to become more permeable, with (1) customers and others outside the organization (e.g., customer advisory groups) being able to come in behind the firewall as warranted, and (2) employees being able to participate in more ways in customer communities.

For social media practitioners and community managers, who by nature and by practice place a great deal of stock in the value that customers can provide, this can be a good place to be.

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

by Matthew Lees

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

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

We live, however, in the real world…

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

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

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

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

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

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Migrating an Online Community is Like Completing Someone Else’s Sudoku

by Matthew Lees

Maniac Sudoku Puzzler on the Loose
Sitting in seat 15D of my homebound flight yesterday, I opened up the airline magazine to work on the Sudoku puzzle in the down time between take off and beverage service.

Unfortunately, to my near horror, someone had already started the “Gentle” Sudoku, entering around 20 numbers, or about a third of what still needed to be filled in. Although the magazine gives three versions to choose from (Gentle, Moderate, and Diabolical), air travel doesn’t make me especially receptive to challenging mental workouts, so I figured I’d just start where the other person left off on the Gentle version.

My initial assumption was that the previous solver knew what they were doing, but either got bored or ran out of time before landing. While my personal puzzle preference leans more towards crosswords, I’m not too bad at Sudokus, so less than one minute into things, I realized that this assumption was a bad one. One nine-by-nine square had two 8s! There were two 9s in another! And how on earth could you write a 4 in that box, when there’s only one 4 given as a starting clue in the whole puzzle?

After some deep breathing exercises to calm me down from this outrage, and spending a few minutes thinking up scenarios that might explain such a poor attempt – not really knowing how Sudokus work, but giving it a whirl anyway? insanity (temporary or otherwise)? intoxication? pure mischievousness (in which case, they got me good)? – I decided to work on it anyway. After all, it was the easiest level, their pen had been black while mine was blue (so I could distinguish who did what), and they hadn’t filled in too too many numbers. So how hard could it be?

I’ll leave out the exciting details, but I completed the puzzle after about 30 minutes. It wasn’t pretty, though, as you can see from the image above. Along the way, I found that, while some of my unknown co-solver’s answers had been wrong, others were indeed correct.

Building a community from scratch is like solving a new Sudoku.
Migrating a community is like solving a Sudoku that someone else already started.

I’m currently working with a client on migrating an online community from one platform to another. Their B2B community has lived for over three years on a homegrown platform that, while impressive three years ago, is now seen as lacking essential features and functionality that the company’s users want and expect, and that the company requires to effectively manage, grow, and maximize the community’s value.

So we’re knee-deep in thinking through the ins and outs of the migration, planning how best to (1) move data (community content and conversations, member profiles, etc.) to the new platform, (2) configure the technology (reputation system, moderation workflow, single sign-on, etc.), and (3) communicate with key enthusiasts/influencers and rest of the user base. Some of these elements are informational in nature, some are technological, and others are social.

What Came Before
The social aspects are particularly apt for the Sudoku analogy. By definition, an online community that’s migrating to a new platform isn’t starting from scratch, which means it already has a culture, a shared history, and certain ways of doing things. The migration can’t help but change some of these. Ideally, all changes will be for the better, but the important thing is, successful migrations depend on knowing what came before.

If you’re involved with a community migration, you may feel that some of the things that came before were good – in the way that some of the original Sudoku solver’s numbers were correct – in which case you’ll replicate them as closely as you can. And some of what came before may not be aligned with the direction you’re going – in the way that I had to change the incorrect Sudoku numbers – so you’ll adapt.

For sure, the analogy (like all analogies) is imperfect. Puzzles have correct answers, but there’s no “right” or “wrong” way to approach online communities. There are only degrees of success based on your and your users’ criteria. But there are best practices based on approaches that tend to work.

Still, you shouldn’t be surprised if things get messy, like my smudged, cross-out-filled Sudoku. A few hurdles are okay if you still get to where you want to go.

A Final Note: If you really don’t like what came before, finger pointing doesn’t solve anything. Experience, expertise, effort, patience, and iteration, however, go a long way. That said, if you recognize your handwriting in black ink in the Sudoku above, I’d like to have a word with you…

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