Read some of these blurbs from the story:

“Once Google delivers the terabytes worth of data, you and your minions can pour over it looking for copyrighted content and those who watched it. Oh, I know you say you just want to understand if people watch more illegal content than legal—like it’s all some academic exercise—but I say there’s more to it than that. You want to go after the viewers. You want to find people who consume too much Colbert Report and MTV on YouTube and find a way to levy a fine on them. “

“With those logs in hand, though, Mr. Redstone, Viacom has the will and means to do all sorts of nasty things. It will learn what copyrighted videos still exist, whether or not people still watch them, and who the watchers are. A witch hunt could ensue.”

What a bunch of nonsense. What did Viacom get the judgement to obtain? User records which can identify which users uploaded the copyrighted videos. Google can and probably will appeal the ruling. Why? Certainly not because they are interesting in protecting their members. Rather they will appeal because once they provide that information, it will no longer be cool to upload videos on YouTube and they will lose advertising revenues. Viewers are only attracted if the content is good….lose the content and you lose the viewers, the ad clicks, and their associated revenue streams.

But the bigger question remains in the author’s mind… “When will they go after the viewers?” Answer: Probably never.

Why? It’s not going to be cost effective nor is there any legal reason to do so. The DMCA is all about those who upload or transfer copyrighted materials, not those who only watch. User data including the transactional metrics for users is very valuable information to have when pursuing a copyright infringement case using the DMCA.

But not because of the information on the viewers separated from the videos uploaded…

The reason to get this information is to isolate the members who uploaded the most copyrighted materials, then build the trail of users who viewed them in order to have metrics backing up the amount that Google/YouTube owes you for the copyrighted content. Secondary reason is that if you lose this suit and Google/YouTube is found to be protected under the Safe Harbor Provision of the DMCA, then you have the data through discovery to go after the individuals who are now responsible for the lost revenues. (Not that they will collect the money, but it will send a strong message.)

We continue to hear so many people say that there is no harm in letting the members of a social network or community upload what they want and control the norms of the site. It’s the Internet for goodness sake! But unfortunately, these folks have had a bit too much of the internet communist Kool-Aid. This case is proving that these people (and many of them are consultants in the online community/social networking world) are on the wrong side and mis-informed. We hope that this case continues to move towards a judgement rather than a settlement in order to provide clarity for any organization that offers its members the opportunity to upload content to their site.

Looking for a better way to deal with all of these issues? Contact us. We’re not lawyers, although we have slept at Holiday Inns from time to time….

Strategic Planning for Communities:

Rachel separates the strategic planning into two large areas: Business Strategy and Community Strategy. Business Strategy is very fluid and ever changing to ensure the online community is doing its part to help the business side of EBay. Community Strategy is the detail work of engaging with members (EBay holds lots of offline meetings with their members — 200 to 250 at a single meeting multiple times through out the year and sponsors their EBay users convention), looking at new features for value to members, and maintaining the road map for their technology.

Mark mentioned that for Apple’s Support Community, they prepare an annual plan for a projection of the upcoming year’s resource needs and basic projections. Then once it is prepared, they fight to get the resources needed while fire-fighting issues that may come up during the same time period. (For example, Apple fired all its moderators only to replace them later causing some havoc and hand wringing in the community.) However, once the actual year began, the strategic plan was made irrelevant in two weeks.

Operational Details:

This was an interesting insight into two large online communities. I’ll summarize EBay first, then Apple, then add some great insight into Microsoft’s communities added by Ken Rosen.

EBay:
EBay is concerned about the consistency of their member experience. The community started as a support community but evolved over time to a seller relationship tool. The community team latches on to company employees where they can (some get it, some don’t). Employees post as employees, no personas used. All employee member names are highlighted in PINK. The downside of this strategy is when a valued employee resource leaves the community there is a disruption. EBay uses both employee moderators and outside moderators employed by their software company. To support future strategy, EBay places some community members under an NDA and uses the group as a focus group for new features and site offerings. (A best practice for top communities that we recommend to our clients.) When negative issues like a proposed boycott or other rant regarding pricing comes up in the community, EBay watches but does not respond. While this type of thing can attract media (and has), EBay does not want to come off as defensive.

Apple:
As a support community, Apple is concerned about getting their members a correct answer to their questions as soon as possible. To do this, Apple uses 8 members of their support center. This strategy has resulted in most member questions being answered within an hour of posting. Apple does not use personas to answer questions, in the support world this makes sense. When a disgruntled member starts ranting or posts a negative poll or puts up anything else not related to the mission of the support site, Apple removes it. They use a zero tolerance policy on their user generated content.

Microsoft:
Ken Rosen of Microsoft gave several add on comments about his team and this topic. First, at Microsoft staff are expected to state their opinions (positive and negative) publicly, not through personas. To help identify their top users/members, Microsoft used coupon codes as pass alongs to measure which members had the highest influence in the community. They did this by tracking how many members used a coupon passed along by someone else. Microsoft also surveys customer satisfaction to test how their community is doing. They are thrilled if they get a 5% response rate for Microsoft surveys. Microsoft community member surveys get a 15 to 20% response rate!

Overall, this was a great session with many good points made by the speakers and audience. The ideas of not using personas is a good fit for mature communities but not for newer communities. Our experience has shown that personas are a best practice for new communities to drive engagement and conversion rates. But over time, the personas should diminish their role and let real users take over in the community. The idea of always using a corporate employee member to answer questions has always been an impediment to growth of a community. That’s because the model behavior objective of members answering each other gets stunted by employees answering everything turning the community into a Q&A with the company rather than a many to many conversation.

Thank you EBay, Apple, and Microsoft for sharing your views of large online communities. It was very informative! To learn more about online community management and strategy, please visit our website.

We’ve just finished the introductions this morning. In listening to the attendees, not only do we have a nice mix of very experienced community people, but also several folks new to the community world. What I found interesting was that even the existing, experienced communities are facing similar issues across the board. Issues raised by attendees in the introduction time were:

• How do I measure ROI?
• How can I build more loyalty among my members?
• Our growth has flattened, how do we get it going again?
• How can we get our executives to move away from looking at page views and into the engagement and conversion ratios that I prepare?
• How do we extend the community beyond the U.S.?

So, it’s going to be interesting to see if we will get to some of these issues. I’m always surprised that these questions remain as there is a wealth of knowledge available on various web sites that can help. But it’s good to get these out in the open and hopefully we can help.

Do these questions exist for your community or organization? We can help. Please contact us to find out how…

Here are some of the report’s findings:

1. Only 31% of respondents have a comprehensive online community strategy in place (53% are developing their strategy as they go!)
2. 59% of respondents say their goals are closely aligned with their organization’s corporate goals.

We find this response interesting as if only 31% of respondents have a strategy in place, how can 59% have closely aligned goals?

Additional findings:

1. Metrics are still confusing people in terms of how to use them for ROI. The top ranking metrics be noted as critical for ROI are listed as traffic patterns and statistics (visitors, visits, page views, etc.).
2. Cost savings for Customer Service/Tech Support, Trial Downloads of products, both scored the lowest as critical metrics for ROI. Yet, these two metrics are the easiest to use to demonstrate a base level of support for an ROI case.

Community Managers who responded to the initial survey ranked Membership Growth as the number one success or performance indicator they report on regularly. The most important data that they report upward include (in ranked order): number of members, basic metrics (whatever that means), online content, number of visitors, number of posts, and other meaningless metrics.

More shocking than this is the response to the level of satisfaction/believability of the data with your executives and how satisfied the executives are with the reports they are receiving. A whopping 23% responded very satisfied with 19% responding satisfied. The executive teams we deal with want clear, concise and relevant reporting. That doesn’t sound like what the respondents are delivering to us.

Think there might be a correlation between the lack of a cohesive online community strategy that closely aligns with corporate goals and the lack of sophisticated measurement and reporting? We do.

Many of the respondents (and members of the OCRN) are still confused when it comes to demonstrating the value of their communities to management. With the lack of refinement comes the claim that online community is a soft application that doesn’t deliver results. During budgeting, how can your online community efforts get the funding you need if your team cannot prove its value to management?

Based upon the responses, we wonder how many of the vendors in the Online Community space don’t understand measurement and reporting issues. With budgets tightening, it is clear to us that this has to be a key issue for the industry. Yet in our opinion, the methodology and understanding regressed to pre-2000 levels. That’s a shame, because our ROI analysis does deliver an easy to understand measurement of how the community is delivering on organizational goals.

We help our clients understand exactly how their communities can help with organizational goals and how to measure their success. We start with targeted audience attraction through PPC efforts and sponsored content efforts, then follow these members through the online community value chain to demonstrate the ROI and value that online communities bring to an organization.

Want to learn more about this topic? Leave us a comment or contact us.

1. MySpace agreed to review every image posted to its site. Best way to stop the online nonsense of users adding porn and offensive images is to be proactive. This probably was not done earlier for two reasons. The first is that the amount of images to review is probably quite large and would be very expensive to hire staff to do the reviews. The second is that the actual amount of images which are offensive and posted to the site is relatively small. But this is a good step for securing their site and making it more attractive for parents who are concerned about their children’s activities online.
2. Cross checking sex offender databases against the MySpace registration database. This is something that probably wasn’t thought about when MySpace was created. But in this age of immediate contact, communication, and internet gratification, it is warranted now. Just watch NBC’s “To Catch A Predator” series and you’ll see how the bad guys use the internet to go after children. Another good step by MySpace that other social networks should consider adopting. Afterall, many sex offenders are barred from using the internet to contact underage minors in their probation agreements. This would serve as an additional layer of law enforcement protection if the sites would contact local law authorities when sex offenders are found to have registered on their sites. (The only downside that we see from this element is that it may drive offenders deeper undercover, making them harder to find online.)
3. MySpace profiles for those users who are 15 and 16 will automatically be set to a default private setting. Another logical step. Hopefully, this doesn’t impact the use by this group but in some cases safety does need to come first.

It will be interesting to see the technology that MySpace will create and use to enforce the age based controls on the site. (Just like the video controls and copyright safeguards technology we’re still waiting to see from Google…).

Just as Facebook agreed with the NY State Attorney’s office to remove any objectionable content reported by users within 24 hours, these steps are a movement in the right direction and actually are implementing the best practices for running a community web site.

The way that many of the social networks sites run is to let users control everything and only act when contacted by an authority such as a state’s Attorney General. Not the best idea for these web sites. With the money that they are making, they need to invest in keeping their sites from becoming pits of objectionable content home to predators and perverts. In the long run, a solid moderation system such as we’ve implemented for several clients will save much more than it costs.

Want to learn more about effective moderation techniques or online safety for children? Contact us, we’d be happy to help.

1. Measurement of your community is not enough! Too many community teams measure very strict areas under their control without integrating their results into the larger organization’s picture. Our client, SAP understands this and measures from the online ad to the deal in a single report we prepare for them.
2. It’s the people, not the technology! Put another way, if you build it, they won’t necessarily come. What was true in 2000 is true today. Yet we talked to about 20 community and marketing teams in 2007 who could not understand why their social networks and community efforts were failing. It takes more than a pretty UI and good technology to succeed.
3. Personas are stronger than moderators. Again and again, we read blogs and hear in conferences that the community host/moderator should engage the visitors by being an active member of the community who starts threads and adds content to demonstrate the commitment of the organization to the community. This is not only a myth continually perpetuated by others, but a real negative to “real community members” who expect the moderator to be the referee, not a participant. Moderators who engage the community as moderator rather than host have a tendency to become personally involved in the personality and behavior conflicts rather than being able to stand back and objectively moderate. Personas are much more effective.
4. Just because a member is a long term member doesn’t mean that you allow them to remain a member for life. Some community teams are afraid to remove a long time member from their community for repeated violations. We had a situation in the end of 2006 where we removed a long term, previously publicly recognized super user. Unfortunately, this member went to the dark side and became hostile to other members and the moderation team. A decision was made, the controversy eventually subsided and the community was better for that member’s removal. Ugly? Yes. Effective? Yes.
5. Members will report violations of the terms of service and community norms because they “care” about their community. Another myth continually mentioned in books, articles, blogs, and conferences. We’ve tracked actual violations against member reported violations for five different communities this year (our clients and our roundtable members). What did we find? On average, members only report 20-30% of all violations. The type of violation they miss the most? Copyright violations, the ones that can really hurt your organization if left on your site. Just ask Google/YouTube or the now defunct Bolt.com. Members do not think it is their job to police or moderate the network or community. They think it’s your job and they are correct.
6. Social Networks are not really communities. This one will shock some folks. But as we’ve helped clients engage their site visitors using both Social Networking tools and traditional online community tools, we’ve been able to use metrics to identify key differences which affect the impact and the results realized from them. The number one difference? Social Networks are all about ME. Communities are all about WE. Social Network members spend time on THEIR OWN pages and return there more often than they go elsewhere. The networks that are built are small and usually exclusive versus the traditional community’s inclusive nature. They lack the power that larger traditional communities have in helping people resolve their issues.

The work we did in 2007 did reinforce something that we already knew… that people not tools make communities succeed or fail. If you’ll concentrate as much time on the people that come to your site and how to help them succeed, you’ll succeed.

Good luck in 2008.

If you’d like to learn more about the best practices that can help you succeed, please contact us.

But digging deeper, it may just be that marketers jumped in without a plan for measuring their success and relied on traffic measures to justify their expense. That is always a recipe for disaster in marketing using interactive marketing sites like Second Life, Facebook, MySpace, and even LinkedIn. The idea that traffic will magically turn a poorly planned campaign into a success is a faulty one at best. And that’s where some marketers go wrong in looking to use virtual worlds…

It is never enough to set up a space in a virtual world (existing or creating your own) without specific calls to action that you can measure and bring back to a business objective. Just as we counsel our clients and prospects to develop success metrics prior to a launch, we would also tell anyone looking to use interactive technology to make sure they understand just what it is they want their members to do when they visit. So here is our quick list of what’s working and what is not in virtual worlds today:

What’s working:

1. Clickable offers for members visiting your area – Coupons, downloadable avatar accessories for basic information or taking a survey
2. Clever updates- Think virtual billboard tactics where your images and message change on a regular basis
3. Persona avatars to greet and discuss your product in the context of the site and member conversations (i.e. subtle references and recommendations, not hard sell)
4. One off events built up with lots of publicity – for an idea of what I mean, look only as far as CSI using Second Life in its television shows. While a coup for Second Life, the buzz for CSI was pretty good and I’m sure it drove in some additional younger viewers who didn’t previously watch.

What’s not working:

1. Build it and they will come thinking – Too many marketers fall into the Field of Dreams syndrome regarding using third party virtual worlds. Just as any interactive element used today, virtual worlds require staff or outsourced contractors to maintain the excitement, interact with users, and in general play greeter to visitors.
2. Poorly executed measurement – relying only on traffic metrics such as visits and views of your virtual property. You need to move towards ratios that measure activity of consequence for your brand and business.
3. The Jump Off the Bridge syndrome- Remember what your Dad used to say? “Just because all of your friends want to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, do you?” Too much herd mentality out there in interactive marketing. Be original with clear expectations and ideas, don’t just do a virtual land grab because your competition is already there. What if it’s a money loser for them? Do you really want to follow?

There’s a lot of good things happening in Virtual World thinking and practices. Children’s sites like ClubPenguin, Webkins, and others are booming as safe havens for kids online. (Our 3 boys are members of both and interact with their classmates and cousins in these worlds.)

While this same excitement hasn’t taken hold in the business community (except for the gaming world), if done right a well thought out presence in a virtual world can yield great business results.

While many of us who work in the online community industry have known about BayTSP, a great article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal “YouTube Magic: Now You See It, Now You Don’t” gives a fabulous peak into the world of the copyright police. A couple of really interesting points in the article:

• BayTSP charges clients between $100,000 and $500,000 per month to help them protect their copyrighted materials
• Employees are paid minimal wages to do this ($11.00/hour or so)
• They don’t reveal their clients in their publicity or on their website

Doing a quick Google on BayTSP reveals that their clients include Viacom, Fox, Paramount, Columbia Pictures (Sony), and many other of the major entertainment companies.

While the article makes it appear that BayTSP is concentrating on the big major websites such as Google’s YouTube, the search shows that they go after both big and small web sites. After all, a violation is a violation. There are many posts in the communities for Peer-to-peer (file sharing) networks about members getting the cease and desist letters from BayTSP on behalf of their clients. Some of those who received the letters are only downloading or uploading music and movies to the networks. Seems that Limewire is a favorite target….

So what is the business upshot to all this? Simple. If you are going to allow users to upload content to your site whether its pictures, videos, or even news articles you need to be proactive in reviewing it and deleting it before a company like BayTSP finds it. Why? Because with the fees that they are charging, BayTSP and others are not a free moderation service. Multiple violations and letters will surely bring a lawsuit to your office. How much will it cost your organization if there is a lawsuit? Let’s take a shot at figuring it out:

1. Cost of BayTSP service over the course of a year for a media company to find violations on your site and send letters to you: $50,000/month (only a portion of the total fees to BayTSP) for a total of $600,000
2. Legal Fees: $100,000 for attorney review, paperwork costs and time, as well as filing costs
3. Lost royalties: Tricky, but figure that if you have 100 clips that violate copyrights each month and on the copyright holder’s site, those clips generate $1,000 in ad revenue (PPI) per month on the media company’s site, then you have a lost royalties amount of $1,200,000.
4. Your organization’s legal costs: Internal General Counsel – 100 hours of time at $125/hour or $12,500. Outside Legal Counsel – 100 hours of time at $300/hour or $30,000. (And this is just to respond to the initial lawsuit and answer the initial complaint, not perform discovery or file any counter suits.)

On a combined basis, you might be looking at an amount of $1,900,000 plus before damages for a single copyright holder (media company). Perhaps you’ll be able to settle for $1,000,000 and enter into an consent agreement to remove copyrighted materials on your own in the future. But what of the other media companies that learn of your violations? Because you know that your members are not going to only put Comedy Central clips on your site, they are also going to use copyrighted songs for their own videos, news clips from CNN and others, as well as photos and articles from major newspapers. Over time, the failure to manage and moderate these contributions gets very expensive…

Put these costs against the costs of hiring a moderation firm to pro-actively remove copyrighted material in advance of anyone reporting it to you through a cease and desist letter and it really shows the risk/reward of not being proactive is off the charts.

Good moderation can range from $60,000 for small sites to over $1,000,000 for large sites annually. When you put the costs of moderation against the possible costs of a lawsuit (and the corresponding negative publicity for your brand and your career), what would you choose?

Do you want to learn more about this topic? Contact us. With over seven years in moderating user generated content for large organizations, we are well versed in protecting your company from these types of issues while providing an excellent online experience for your site’s customers, members, and visitors. Impact Interactions can review all the user generated content placed on your site by members, whether it’s blog entries, comments, message board posts, photos, or videos.

Prior to joining Impact Interactions, Dan worked with Cisco Systems’ award winning Networking Professionals Community (NetPro). In his role with Impact Interactions, Dan will continue to lead all engagements within Cisco, including the ongoing moderation engagement for NetPro. Additionally, Dan will provide best practices for Impact Interactions’ business-to-business clients pursuing online community-based interactive strategies.

“Dan provides our clients with an additional level of online community expertise. He and I worked together in the early days of NetPro at Cisco and his experience in using online communities to drive measurable results is significant,” states Impact Interactions president Mike Rowland. “With the addition of Dan, Impact Interactions continues to build the strongest database of best practices in the online community world for our clients. His deep knowledge of technical support, marketing, and partner communities brings tremendous expertise to Impact Interactions which in turn will help our clients succeed.”

For additional information regarding online moderation or user generated content strategies, please contact us at ImpactInteractions.com.

Summing it up, Viacom believes that YouTube is violating the DMCA because YouTube is a media company that has knowledge of the copyright violations. The DMCA is written to protect companies involved in the building blocks of the internet such as routing, ISPs, etc. not media companies such as Google and YouTube. Mr. Dauman also states that his company, Viacom was spending large sums of money on a team that was manually going through YouTube (and probably other sites as well) looking for Viacom content which was posted/uploaded to the site by users in violation of the copyright. Those costs in addition to the money that YouTube was making on the ads shown on the site are real money that is coming out of the revenue stream of Viacom.

Google and YouTube on the other hand argue that the DMCA applies to them and that they complied with the law because when notified by copyright holders, they removed the copyrighted materials. Eric Schmidt goes so far as to state that the dispute is about “whether there is a shared responsibility around the take down provision or not.”

The folks at Google understand and clearly state that this is about money… but they want to make the money at someone else’s expense. The DMCA is going to be tested here and hopefully through case law, clarified as to exactly what constitutes a hosted site allowed to store copyrighted materials and what is a media site. Common sense would say that if a site is making money from unlicensed copyrighted content, they should have to pay for it or remove it themselves. In our opinion, it does not make sense to allow sites and companies to earn revenue on copyrighted content for which they don’t own or license the right to show.

Your local cable access station cannot let you sign up for free air time and then show an episode of the Colbert Report you recorded at home, why should the internet be any different? As companies such as Apple and Microsoft work to bring television to the web and help define the industry, sites allowing video uploads should be held to the same standards as local cable access television stations. The principles are the same. It will be very interesting to see how the courts rule. Of course, given the money involved, there will most likely be a deal announced in the next couple of months between Viacom and Google so the law will not be examined as it should.

In terms of the uncertainty right now over the DMCA and online user generated content, we advise our clients to scan their site and remove blatant copyrighted materials uploaded as they find them. For example, message board posts that contain images from Warner Brothers or Disney cartoons are edited. Videos and photos from television shows or movies are edited or removed. When community managers make a “best effort” to remove copyrighted materials, the firm has a defense against the inevitable lawsuit. With copyright confusion, the best defense is a good offense.

Want to learn more about protecting your company and keeping your members happy? Contact us, we’d be happy to discuss the successful best practices we’ve developed in this area.