The Business of Community – Ebay and Apple (with help from Microsoft)

Rachel Makool of EBay and Mark Freeman Williams of Apple Support presented interesting ideas regarding strategic planning and operations of a large online community.

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.

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