Category Archives: community

community

Why Companies Should Have Online Communities

As a community manager, I frequently take online communities for granted. Are you a business? Do you have or want to have customers? Then yes, of course you should have an online community (is that really a question?)

I’m here at Innotech this week, and this question came up on my panel about Online Communities. I wanted to share and elaborate on my answer to the question of “Why build an online community in the first place?”

I have a few reasons:

  • People: Communities first & foremost are about the people. Having a community gives people a place to engage with your company. These people will talk about you and your products in blogs and other online forums whether you choose to participate or not, so giving people a place to talk about you can help you keep engaged with the conversations.
  • Product Innovation: Communities provide a great forum for getting product feedback. It gives you a central place to ask questions about how people use your products. You also get to see first-hand what they complain about, what issues they have, and where they have questions about you or your products.
  • Evangelism: Communities also help you grow evangelists for your products from outside of your company. These are the customers or users of your products that are passionate and deeply engaged with you. Interestingly enough, these people frequently come to your defense within the community when people say negative things about your company. They can also have exceptional feedback for you, so it is important to identify these people early and encourage them to get deeply engaged (often with some special community permissions). For Jivespace, I created a special “Friends of Jivespace” blog with top community members as authors.
  • Brand Loyalty: Having a community can also help drive brand loyalty for your products. Giving people a place to engage with you can drive a tremendous amount of loyalty for your products.

These were my top four reasons, but I’m sure there are many more reasons to build an online community. I would love to hear your suggestions in the comments!

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community

Cool Oregon Events This Week

We have several really cool events coming up this week, and I wanted to remind everyone to attend (I’ll be there)!

For those thinking in the long-term, don’t forget about these:

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community

Marketing and Online Communities Research

Bill Johnston puts together some of the most detailed community research that I’ve seen (if you’ve seen something better, I’d love to know about it!), and his latest is a report on Marketing and Online Communities.

The study explored the current state of marketing to online communities, from the perspective of both the online community host, as well as from the perspective of the marketer.

We discovered early on in the research process that while community hosts and practitioners were willing to share their experiences, most marketers were not. At the beginning of the research I conducted several in-person interviews, it became clear that most marketing and advertising agencies have not met with great success in their community marketing efforts, and are unwilling to talk about their experiences. What limited success marketers have had is generally viewed as proprietary knowledge within the agency, and is closely guarded.

Quoted from Bill Johnston on the Online Community Report Blog

As you can see from the above quote, marketing and communities don’t always mix. Participating genuinely and talking about ideas seems to be better than pushing hard-core marketing and advertising onto the community. I’ve talked about marketing and good ways to engage with the communities many times before, so I won’t elaborate here (you can read the related posts below if you haven’t already heard my rants) 🙂

You can download and read the entire report (after a small, relatively painless registration), and decide for yourself.

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community

What Would Dr. Seuss Say about Online Communities

I had the opportunity to do an Ignite Portland presentation last night about online communities in the context of Dr. Seuss quotes. It was a lot of fun to prepare; I got to sit in the children’s section of the library reading Dr. Seuss books for a few hours, which is always a good time! I also had a great time giving the talk – complete with a Cat in the Hat, hat!

You can view the video on YouTube and the presentation on SlideShare.

UPDATE: I removed the earlier embeds, since they were really slowing down the load time of this page.

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community, ignite, ignite portland, legion of tech, news, portland

Ignite Portland Featured in the Oregonian!

w00t! We made the front page of the living section in the Oregonian with a really nice write-up about Ignite Portland. You have to buy the Saturday paper edition to get the full write-up. I’m curious what this will do for RSVPs?

Thanks to Scott Kveton for the pics:

Update 1/26/08 9:10am PST:

You can now find the Ignite Portland write up online, too (minus the pictures). Thanks to @kveton &  @mfriesen via twitter for the link.

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collaboration, community

Connect! A Guide to a New Way of Working

I just finished Connect! A Guide to a New Way of Working by Anne Zelenka. Connect is all about web workers, those people who spend all or part of their time working remotely over the web either as telecommuters, freelancers, or some other online working arrangement. When I was at Compiere, I spent about 6 months working remotely, and I could have used a book like this. Based on what I learned from my experience, this book was right on target and offers great advice to people interested in working over the web with good coverage of both the good and the bad aspects. While the flexibility was great for me, you can go a little stir crazy, and Anne has a lot of ideas to help minimize the issues inherent in working from home.

In addition to the basic information about web working, some of the related ideas in the book really helped define some of what I have been noticing over the past couple years that seem to he changing the way people work. Anne makes a great distinction between knowledge work and web work. With knowledge work, the focus has been on the corporation, proprietary technologies, desktop tools, and knowledge, but in contrast, web work is focused on individuals, open technologies, web tools, and relationships. When I was at Intel, the focus was more on knowledge work, but I am noticing that at Jive, the focus is on web work as Anne defines it with collaboration, openness, and relationships being of utmost importance. As an community person, I am definitely more suited to the web work model.

Busy vs. bursty is also a common theme throughout the book. Busy work is based on work hours, email, company relationships, inflexible long-term planning, and web surfing as a time waster, while bursty work is about getting the job done regardless of hours worked, collaboration tools instead of email, relationships that are broader than just your company, agile planning, and web surfing as fuel for ideas. This isn’t to say that you can replace all of the busy work with bursty work; you still need some amount of busy work to get through the tedious, but necessary tasks. However, bursty work also has a place, and again it tends to be more in the style of how we work at Jive and is more suited to my personal style of working.

I will admit to skipping over a couple of sections, like technology recommendations for home work systems, since I have an in depth knowledge of some of these topics based on my recent experiences as a web worker. Even if you aren’t a telecommuter or freelancer working mostly over the web, I still recommend the book and Web Worker Daily, the companion web site. It has a lot of interesting ideas for how work is changing as we move more and more of our lives online.

community, ignite, ignite portland, portland

Want to see me present at Ignite2?

Don’t forget to RSVP for Ignite Portland 2! We have some awesome presentations on the lineup.

I’ll even be doing a presentation on online communities in the style of Dr. Seuss. For example:

Dr. Seuss:

“I’m the Lorax who speaks for the trees which you seem to be chopping as fast as you please.

NOW…thanks to your hacking my trees to the ground, there’s not enough Truffula Fruit to go ’round.

And my poor Bar-bar-loots are all getting the crummies because they have gas, and no food in their tummies!”

Dawn’s Translation: Play Nice: Be polite and respectful in your interactions with other members.

Other awesome presentation topics include: robots, rockets, sushi, undercover hookers, biodiesel and more!

community, FastWonderPodcast, podcast

Podcast Episode 6: Online Community Management with Stormy Peters

In this podcast, I talked to Stormy Peters, Director of Community and Partner Programs at OpenLogic. Prior to Open Logic, Stormy founded and managed the Open Source Program Office at HP. She has addressed the United Nations, European Union and various U.S. state governments on open source software, and she is a co-founder of the non-profit GNOME Foundation. We talked about a variety of topics related to managing successful open source and online communities.

Download:
Online Community Management with Stormy Peters (mp3)

If you are doing something really cool with your online community, please let me know! I am open to suggestions for potential interviews.

You can also subscribe to the Fast Wonder Community Podcast via iTunes.

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community, OpenID, scott kveton, social networking

Fast Wonder Community Podcast: Data Portability and Social Networking in Online Communities with Scott Kveton

I just published the 5th Fast Wonder Community Podcast today: Data Portability and Social Networking in Online Communities with Scott Kveton. Scott and I discussed a variety of topics related to online communities including data portability, OpenID, and social networking. Listen to the podcast to hear the entire discussion.

If you have any suggestions for people you would like to see interviewed on a future podcast, please let me know!

You can also subscribe to the Fast Wonder Community Podcast via RSS or iTunes.

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community, conference, speaking

Community 2.0 Conference

I wanted to let everyone know that I will be speaking at the Community 2.0 conference on May 13-14 in Las Vegas. I will be joining Silona Bonewald, Bill Johnston, and whurley on a panel about reputation systems: What Do These Points Really Mean? The Pros and Cons of Reputation Systems. If you are interested in attending, I can give you a discount code good for 20% off. A discount AND cool people talking about community AND Las Vegas … how can you beat that?

Leave a comment or send me an email to get the discount code. I hope to see you there!