Consulting services for companies wanting to engage with online communities through social media.Focused on online communities, open technologies, open source, web 2.0, social media, RSS, blogging, and podcasting.
I spent yesterday evening in Corvallis presenting at Corvallis chapter of the Software Association of Oregon on the topic of Companies and Communities: Participating without being sleazy. I always enjoying spending time in Corvallis. It’s a fun college town with some very interesting and innovative technology companies: Strands, ViewPlus, ProWorks, and many more.
This SlideShare presentation is what I used last evening to lead the discussion:
Several Tweets today from Jeremiah Owyang got me thinking about community vendors and how they do (or do not) use their own platforms to build communities for their customers and users.
Quoted from @jowyang’s Twitter stream:
My advice to community platform vendors:
My advice to anyone selecting a community platform vendor:
While Jeremiah says that “Many of the vendors in my community platform wave ironically do NOT offer a community to their own customers to support themselves”, the best vendors do use their own software to build external communities for their customers.
Here are three examples of vendors who eat their own dogfood:
There are plenty of others who run vibrant communities for users of their platform; however, I was surprised by how many do not. While I was working at Jive, we learned so much about our software by using it to host our own communities. We found bugs early, felt the pain points along with our customers, and celebrated when new features were introduced in the product. Any vendor who isn’t eating their own dogfood is using you, their customer, as a testing bed. I’ll take my chances with vendors who use their software over ones that do not any day.
Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:
There are many differences of opinion about where the community manager or the community team should fit into the reporting structure of any organization. In general, I think that it depends on the type of community. The community management function should report to the team most closely connected to the audience you are trying to serve.
Too many companies automatically put the community function under marketing, which works well for certain types of communities, but can be disastrous for other types of communities. For example, developer communities or customer support communities should rarely, if ever, report to marketing. However, I do think that marketing should manage the communities for certain types of customer communities or communities that support a specific marketing campaign. Communities focused on a product line could be driven out of a product marketing group.
Developer communities and open source communities should be driven out of a technology or engineering group, since developer and open source communities tend to work best when they are created by developers for developers. Developers in general have very little tolerance for marketing and anyone who lacks technical credibility.
Support communities should be driven as part of the broader support organization to ensure that the customers in the community are getting an appropriate level of support. The support staff deals with support questions all day and are the most appropriate group to be answering the questions in the support forums and making sure that support customers have what they need from the company.
In some cases, the community should report to the senior management of the organization. Some communities cover multiple functions including developers, support, customers, and product information. In those cases, the community team should be placed high enough in the organization to be able to effectively interface with all of the other teams in the organization. If the community is a critical part of the the products or services offered by the company, it might need to be it’s own function within the organization.
It is worth spending some extra time deciding where the community function should be placed within the organization. You need to take a careful look at the audience for your community and place the community in the appropriate organization.
During Marshall Kirkpatrick’s session at WordCamPDX last weekend, he talked about some of his customized search engines, which inspired me to create one of my own.
Google does a great job of finding everything for a keyword, but it doesn’t really know how to filter for posts matching less measurable criteria. For example, a standard Google search can’t filter for the blogs of people that I think are really smart and interesting. The idea behind the custom search engine is that I can tell Google which sites I want it to search, and then Google does its magic to find the best posts within the limits that I provide. Marshall uses his custom search engines as a starting place for research to get quotes for blog posts or learn more about a topic he’s researching.
I have plans for a few others, but I wanted to start with a custom search engine for online community thought leaders. I’m hoping it will help me when I’m doing research for blog posts or consulting clients. In order to keep the results relevant, I’m limiting the number of sites searched to a very small number of blogs from people that I think are thought leaders in the online community space. While I have a huge respect for many people who work at companies that make community platform software, I’m deliberately not including blogs from vendors to attempt to keep the search vendor neutral.
Here are the first blogs to make the cut:
You can try the Online Community Thought Leader search for yourself and let me know what you think:
Now the big question for you:
Who did I miss? Did I leave someone amazing off of the list? If so, you can leave suggestions in the comments.
Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:
I was looking at the new SocialText 3.0 release this morning, which TechCrunch describes as a blend of “Facebook, Twitter and the Enterprise”, when I started thinking about a trend that I have been noticing for quite a while related to companies, communities, and community software.
The Software
SocialText has been known for their wiki software; however, the latest 3.0 release shifts the focus more toward people with the new SocialText People (social networking functionality) and Dashboard (attention stream management of conversations, colleagues and more). The wiki is still the core part of the product, but this additional functionality shifts the focus onto people.
Jive Software also recently released a new version of Clearspace, and the major differences between this release and the previous ones are also focused on people with social networking and groups functionality leading the way.
These are just a couple of examples of community software focused on the enterprise; however, they are incorporating the features that people have been using extensively in their personal online community interactions through sites like Facebook, Twitter, and more to connect with other people.
The Trend
If you look at the early community software platforms and other early ways of building communities (mailing lists, etc.), the focus was on the data more than the person. Inside companies, the focus was similar. Companies had knowledge bases, document repositories, email and other ways for people to share data. Most of these applications made it easy to find data, but difficult to find out any real information about the people behind the data. Even some of the applications designed to help coworkers find other people within the company were often skill based, which made it easy to find someone with Java programming expertise but not the sort of information that tells you about the person behind the skill set.
I’ve said many times in presentations and here on this blog that communities are all about the people. This has always been an important concept, but it has been more true in social communities and less true in many corporate communities. Over the past months, I have been seeing a bigger trend toward companies and other organizations putting the focus on the people in corporate communities. The information is still important, but I like seeing this shift toward people. Knowing more about the person behind the data can help put the data into context. For example, information about venture capital investments coming from me would be less credible than information about venture capital from Guy Kawasaki.
Having the functionality to connect with other people in a corporate community, whether it is an internal company community or an external community focused on a company’s products, helps us strengthen our connections with other people who share similar interests. This trend toward putting the focus on people is an important step in the right direction for corporate communities.
Related Fast Wonder Blog posts
Community ownership is a tricky issue. In this post, I am not talking about legal ownership, but about something a little more abstract. I’m sure the courts would come up with a different conclusion than the one that I propose here. I’m really talking about the sense of ownership that people feel for something that they are passionate about because they helped to create it in some way. This sense of ownership is a big part of what makes an active community so special and interesting.
Too many people and companies think that they “own” their community with a level of ownership that includes exerting too much control over the members participating in the community. Some people delete posts or comments containing criticisms that don’t show them in the best light. The natural instinct for some people is to bury anything that is less than favorable, but this is not a healthy approach for anyone (it’s how we end up with companies like Enron).
A better approach is to think of it this way: the community “owns” the community, and the employees of an organization or other people hosting the community are an integral part of that community. If you think of yourselves as an equal member of the community, it might be more natural to have conversations about negative criticism and work to resolve them together. Maybe this is just semantics, but I think it can help people think about the community in a way that facilitates collaboration and cooperation.
Anyone who starts a community is responsible for a few things. Clearly, they do own the infrastructure and the environment where the online community software resides. As a result, they should feel a responsibility to maintain the software and keep it running well. They are also responsible for facilitating the discussions and participating in the community along with the other community members. Finally, they are also responsible for moderation and keeping people in check by deleting spam, porn and other content that is truly inappropriate for the community. As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, negative comments do not count as “inappropriate” for the sake of moderation.
If the company doesn’t play nice with the community, the community will take their discussions elsewhere. Thinking about the issue of ownership in a way that encourages community members to consider themselves a real part of the community is just one more way to encourage people to remain actively engaged in the community.
Last week, I started a series focused on corporate communities with posts about planning and getting started, maintaining a successful community, and structuring your community. In this final post for the corporate community series, we will spend some time on the right and wrong ways to promote your community efforts. Some of this advice also applies more broadly to promotion of other social media efforts as well.
Good ways to get the word out about your community
I wish there was an easy answer to the best way to get the word out about your community; however, it really comes down to basic marketing principles. Do your research to find your audience and talk about your community efforts in places that your target audience will see it. The specific methods you use to promote your community will depend on the type of community and the target audience. If your company already has an existing customer base, you should be using existing promotional vehicles to reach your customers. Look at the ways that you typically market your products, and include information about your community efforts in those promotions.
You should augment your traditional promotions with social media keeping in mind the guiding principles that I talked about in an earlier post. The key is to engage with social media on the community’s terms with a focus on having a conversation with people, not a focus on pushing your messages at people. Talk openly and honestly about the new community on your corporate blog with information about why you launched it, what you hope to get out of it, and what you hope the members will get out of the community. People involved in the community effort can write personal blog entries or Twitter posts that talk specifically about their involvement in the new community. Audio or video podcasts might also be a good idea.
With any new community, always run a limited beta with your existing customers or a few potential customers if your company is still new. There are many benefits of running a beta. First, you can get their feedback and make improvements in the community before you launch. Second, you get a good base of initial content from people outside of the company, so that when you launch, it already looks like an active community. Third, these existing beta users can help promote the community by bringing in coworkers, friends, and others who might be interested in joining your community.
You might also consider providing small incentives for people to join and participate. You do not want people joining just to get the incentive and never coming back to participate, but some small incentive (t-shirt, etc.) can sometimes be a nice thank you gesture for signing up. Don’t forget to make a special effort to find some way to reward the early beta participants after launch with special status, discounts, t-shirts, or something to say thank you.
Things to avoid when promoting your community
Do not promote your community on your competitor’s sites. This is just slimy, and it will not be productive. The potential for backlash and negative publicity is not worth the one or two customers that you might pick up. It will also encourage your competitor to retaliate by promoting within your community.
Do not use social media (twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc.) with the sole purpose of pimping your products (go back to the guiding principles post for more details). If you are already using social media, you should talk about your ideas, thoughts, and products with a personal spin (what YOU are doing as an individual in the new community).
Should you promote your products in the community?
The short answer is no, but it isn’t really an absolute (yes / no) answer; it is really more of a continuum. Do not use your community to sell anything. Think of the community as way to generate awareness, not a place to close sales. Use your community to get people excited about your products: answer questions, talk about new features, and encourage people share stories about your product or company (customers and employees). If you can get people excited about your products, they will be motivated to figure out how to buy them.
ForumOne’s report on Marketing and Online Communities does a good job of highlighting the challenges associated with using your community as a marketing channel.
I would be interested to learn more about what has or has not worked well for you in the comments.
Related Fast Wonder Blog posts
Lately, I have been thinking quite a bit about corporate communities as I work with clients who are in the process of creating new online communities or improving their existing communities. Earlier this week, I blogged about planning and getting started with an online corporate community and maintaining a successful corporate community. I thought that it would be a good idea to also spend a little time on the things that you should be thinking about when coming up with a structure for your community.
It is important to keep in mind that every community software package is likely to have unique strengths and limitations when it comes to configuring your community. From a design and architecture perspective, I strongly recommend looking at this strengths and limitations of the platform and taking them into account before starting any design or architecture work. Make sure that any customizations that you do will be compatible with the community platform and will be easy to upgrade to future versions of the software. I have seen way too many companies try to shoe horn a design that just is not compatible with the platform they selected. In most cases, they are able to make it work for the initial launch, but then spend way too much time and effort during every upgrade or even worse, they get themselves into a situation where upgrading the platform or applying bug fixes becomes nearly impossible.
You should also take a careful look at how much structure to put in place when determining the category or discussion forum structure for your community. The specific categories will depend on the type of community and your specific situation, but I generally look at these three basic approaches: emergent, highly-structured, and adaptive.
Emergent
In an emergent structure, very few (if any) categories are defined before launch, and the structure is allowed to emerge based on the discussions that people are interested in having within your community. As the discussions unfold, you should start to see some common themes. New categories are created and discussions are placed into these categories based on the themes that are emerging in the community.
Advantages to the emergent approach.
Disadvantages to the emergent approach.
I do not generally recommend an emergent structure for corporate communities; however, I could see it being useful in certain situations. In an environment where the industry or product was undefined or unclear and you wanted to avoid constraining people’s ideas into categories, allowing the structure to emerge might generate more innovative or unusual discussions. This structure is also more commonly and more effectively used in social (non-corporate) communities.
Highly Structured
In a highly structured community, all possible categories are defined before the community launch in great detail.
Advantages to the highly structured approach.
Disadvantages to the highly structured approach.
This structure may work fine in certain situations where the categories can be easily predicted and the environment is well understood; however, it can be a bit heavy handed. When it is used, I recommend sticking with broader categories rather than narrow ones whenever possible. Broad categories with more participation will make the community look much more active than if the same amount of participation is split among twice as many categories.
I made the mistake of using this approach when I created the structure for the Jivespace community. I defined way too many narrow categories and put too much structure in place. There were a few categories that people used most of the time, and a few that were rarely used. I would have been better off if I had defined about half as many categories or if I had used the adaptive approach described below.
Adaptive
The adaptive approach is really a hybrid between the emergent and highly structured approaches. A few very broad categories are created to get the community started in the right direction, and additional categories are created as needed after people start participating.
Advantages of the adaptive approach.
Disadvantages of the adaptive approach.
In most situations the adaptive approach is the one that I recommend. It is the most flexible, and it is fairly easy to implement.
Allowing Off Topic Discussions
When you create the structure for your community, you should assume that people will have some off topic discussions in your community. The best way to facilitate this without disrupting the rest of the community is to create a place where people can have these discussions. While they may be slightly off topic, I have found them quite productive for the community on occasion. For example, I’ve seen people using the community to find out which other members were planning to attend an upcoming conference on a related topic. As a community manager, I have used them to talk about interesting things going on in the company or the industry that did not directly relate to community. I caution against calling it something like “off topic”, since people may take you up on the offer to discuss too many random topics. I’ve had pretty good luck calling it “the lounge” or something similar.
Ultimately, the structure you select for your community will depend on your individual situation. No one structure is right or wrong for every situation, so you may need to experiment a little to get it right for you. During the beta phase for your community, you can get quite a bit of feedback about the structure allowing for some adjustments prior to the public launch.
You should also plan to adjust the structure over time regardless of which approach you use. The industry and your products will change over time, and the community structure will need to evolve along with these changes.
What are your tips for organizing and structuring your community?
Related Fast Wonder Blog posts
Apparently, this is corporate community week on the Fast Wonder Blog. I decided to follow up my post on Monday about Custom Corporate Communities: Planning and Getting Started with this post containing tips about what to do and what to avoid doing if you want to have a successful corporate community. While some of these tips are specific to corporate communities, most of them also apply to other types of communities as well.
The are many ways for a company to encourage or discourage participation in their community just by the way employees behave in the community, the way the community is facilitated, and how the infrastructure is maintained. There are a few things you can do to help ensure that the community successful, while other activities are likely to drive the community away. This post will cover both the do’s and don’ts along with some tips for maintaining a successful community.
What makes a community work
Being open and transparent. Being as open and transparent as possible will improve trust within the community. It often helps to explain the “why” behind some of your decisions to avoid being seen as closed or defensive. In general people are more understanding, especially about difficult topics if you can explain why the company responds in a certain way.
A company who listens (to good and bad). It is easy to listen and respond when people say nice things about you or your company, but you should also be responding when people complain or provide negative feedback. The key is to respond constructively with something helpful: a suggestion, information about upcoming changes, or just a simple thank you.
Actively engaged in the community. The company should not dominate the community, but they should be actively participating by creating new content, responding to feedback, and in general being visible in the community.
Encouraging new members. Whenever possible, welcome new members of the community, especially if they are particularly actively in the community.
Making it easy for people to participate. Reduce the barriers to entry for people to participate and make it as easy as possible to join the community. Allowing people to view content before joining and a simple sign-up form with very few required fields can go a long way toward reducing the barriers to participation.
Integration into other relevant areas of the site. In most cases, it is simple to pull information from your community into static areas of your website. This makes your static website seem less static, and it drives more people to your community when they see a piece of content that they are interested in reading. For example, if you have a static page describing your efforts in sustainability, you could pull the 5 most recent blog posts or discussions from the sustainability section of your community into a sidebar on the static page.
What to avoid
Community is lip service. People can tell when a company creates a community to give the appearance of listening, while not really considering it a serious endeavor. If you aren’t serious about engaging with your community, then you might be better off not spending the effort to create one.
Pushing marketing messages. When pushing marketing messages out to the community members takes precedence over 2-way conversations and collaboration, you will start to see your community disappear. A community is about conversations between people, and you can talk about your products, but it should be done in a relevant and conversational tone, instead of sounding like a pitch or advertisement.
Deleting the negative. You should be responding to criticism, not deleting it. Again, communities are about conversation. If people feel like you are putting duct tape over their mouths when they express anything negative about the company, these people will simply leave their negative comments somewhere else on the internet where it is likely more people will see the criticism and not hear your side of the story.
Barriers to collaboration. Community software, configuration, or policies can often create barriers to collaboration. Configure the software to make it easy for people to find content and sign up for the community. Your policies should create guidelines for use that help keep the community healthy without being so heavy handed that people aren’t interested in participating. Flickr’s community guidelines are a good example of how to write guidelines that are simple and even fun to read.
Neglected communities. Nobody wants to participate in a corporate community where no one in the company monitors or responds to questions or feedback. There are too many of these floating around the internet, so make sure that you have the resources to give your community care and feeding over the life of the community.
Dealing with the difficult
Every community has its fair share of difficulties. While you can never anticipate every difficult experience, many of them seem to fall into one of these four categories.
Negative Comments. As I mentioned earlier, do not delete negative feedback or negative comments. I generally hold off before responding to the negative feedback to see if other non-employee community members come to my rescue first. If not, you’ll need to respond constructively and honestly with as much information as you are able to provide, and you need to respond without getting defensive.
Spammers. Spammers are a huge, painful thorn in a community manager’s side. You should put aggressive, automated measures in place to deal with spam; however, also be prepared for them to find ways around your spam filters. Spammers are a creative group, and they will find ways to spam your community that you never thought was possible. Deal with the spam as quickly and completely as possible.
Pain in the ass. There are always those people who are just a pain. They complain that your documentation has a typo, you don’t file bugs quickly enough, or anything else that isn’t getting done to their exacting standards. In many cases, these are people who really do want to make things better. My advice in this case may sound counter-intuitive, but you should put them to work if possible and reward their efforts. If they complain about the documentation, see if you can convince them to re-write a section. If that works, you might find other ways to put them to work to channel that energy into fixing instead of complaining.
Don’t feed the trolls. These are the people who complain and act out because they want attention. They will take up as much of your time as you give them in pointless arguments and distractions. It can be difficult for many people not to take the bait. Ignore them and resist the urge to give them the attention they crave. If they don’t find someone to argue with, they will generally move on to another community where they can make trouble.
No community is perfect
You need to keep in mind that no community will ever be perfect: things will go wrong; your community software will have bugs; and people will get defensive or irate. In addition to the internal factors in the community, there are external influences that can creep into the community. Companies have PR nightmares that drive people into the community in droves to complain, but in great communities, the company responds effectively, addresses the issue, and works to resolve it quickly. When you have one of these crisis situations, keep the focus on summarizing and fixing, instead of blaming and justifying. Maintain open communication channels and deal with these imperfections and issues as quickly and openly as possible.
What are your favorite tips to help companies have great communities?
Related Fast Wonder Blog posts
Corporate communities refer to any custom community created by an organization for the purpose of engaging with customers or other people who may be interested in the organization’s products and services. For the purpose of this post, custom corporate communities include communities created by corporations, non-profit organizations, educational institutions and similar organizations. These corporate communities can take many different forms: support communities, developer communities to help developers work with your products, customer and enthusiast communities, and many others.
Before jumping in to create a new community, you should think carefully about the purpose of this new community including your goals and objectives, fitting your community efforts into your organization’s overall strategy, measuring success, and committing the resources required to make your community flourish.
Here are a few questions that can help you think through the process of planning for your new community:
What is your overall strategy and how does the community fit with it?
If your custom corporate community does not support the overall strategies of the organization, I give it about a 5% chance of being successful. Creating a new community can be a very large project with quite a bit of upfront work to create the community along with a large effort over the life of the community to manage and maintain it. If this time and effort is spent in support of the overall corporate strategy, then it will be much easier to justify keeping the community during the next planning cycle for your organization. On the other hand, when a community is built to support goals that are not clearly aligned with the overall strategy, people will look at it as a big expense that can be cut, and your community will die a quick death if you are lucky or a horrible slow death by neglect if you aren’t quite as fortunate.
Spend the time now to make sure that you can find a way to structure your community plans to support the overall strategy of your organization. If you can’t find a good way to align your plans with the strategy, you should think twice about whether a corporate community is an appropriate solution for you right now.
What do you hope to accomplish and what are your goals for the community?
Think very carefully about why you are creating a new community for your organization. Spend plenty of time upfront to clearly define the reasons for creating it and what you will accomplish by having the community. You might want to go back and read my earlier post on the benefits of having a community. You might want to consider some or all of those benefits when you think about the goals for your community:
After you have a good grasp on what you hope to accomplish, you need to set some specific goals for the project. When you get into the platform selection process and design phase later in the project, having clear goals will help ensure that you build the right kind of community to achieve these goals.
What are your plans for achieving your goals and how will you measure success?
Now that you have some goals for what you want to accomplish with your community, you need to figure out some specific steps required to achieve your goals along with the metrics you will use to measure whether or not you have been successful. The metrics that you select will depend on your specific goals, but common community metrics include page views or visits, new member sign ups, and participation (new posts or replies). It is easy to go overboard and measure everything; however, I recommend that you pick a couple (no more than 4 or 5) of the most important measurements to use to report to management on your success. You should have an analytics package or reporting tools that allow you to drill down for more details that you can use to help troubleshoot issues and understand the data, but use these as background materials for your team.
Do you need to build new or can you join an existing community?
This is the reality check portion of the process. If you can join an existing community and get the same or similar benefits for your organization without investing all of the resources to create something new, you should seriously consider joining rather than building. You should also look around your organization to see if you have any existing communities or other infrastructure that you can reuse instead of installing yet another piece of community software.
Do you have the resources (people and financing) to maintain it long-term?
As I mentioned earlier, building a new community is a big effort. It is not one of those projects that you complete and move onto the next one. Building the community and installing the software is the first step, and the real work comes in after the launch of the community. You will need to have people on board and ready to manage the day to day responsibilities from a community perspective and to administer and maintain the software. For a small community this could be a single person, but for a large corporate community, it usually takes a team of people.
You should also plan for frequent upgrades and adjustments to the community, especially right after the launch. You will find bugs in the software, areas of the community that the users find difficult to use for whatever reason, and other things that you will need to adjust once you have people actually using the community. Your organization should be ready to handle these ongoing costs and resource commitments over the life of the community. Nothing is worse than wasting time and money on something that won’t be maintained long enough to achieve your goals.
While this certainly isn’t everything that you need to consider when planning for your new community, hopefully, it will get you started on the right path. For more information, you might also want to read some of Jeremiah Owyang’s posts about community platforms or some of the online community research that Bill Johnston is doing at ForumOne.
I’d love to see you post comments with other things that you consider when planning for a new corporate community.
Related Fast Wonder Blog posts
Fast Wonder Consulting
by Dawn Foster.
Consulting services for companies wanting to engage with online communities through various social media technologies.
Interests include online communities, open technologies, open source, web 2.0, social media, RSS, blogging, podcasting, and innovation.
The opinions expressed in this blog are mine alone.
Contact Info & vCard:
Dawn Foster
Consultant, Community Manager, Event Organizer, Blogger, Podcaster, Vegan, and Technology Enthusiast
Fast Wonder LLC
dawn@fastwonder.com
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