In August, I wrote a post about how Organizational Change Management principles could be used to help increase participation in online communities. Bill Johnson asked me to elaborate on that post with a presentation in the Online Community Research Network Roundtable call, and I wanted to share my slides from that discussion here.
Tag Archives: community
LinuxCon Review: It's All About Community
I had a great time at LinuxCon this week, and I loved that it was held here in Portland, OR. My favorite part of the event was running into old friends and ex-coworkers from my days at Intel who I haven’t seen in ages. It was great catching up with everyone, and I even managed to introduce a few of them to Whiffies and some of my other favorite food carts for quick lunches or late night snacks.
I did a much longer review of the event over on the Olliance Blog, but I wanted to highlight a few things here on Fast Wonder, too.
Community.
I love the sense of community that you get at conferences where most of the audience members are open source developers. People with laptops were clustered together in little groups having conversations, working on code, and eating Voodoo donuts (how many conferences have strangely colored donuts covered with things like bacon and breakfast cereal?)
My favorite community-related session was a keynote by Bdale Garbee on The Freedom to Collaborate. Much of what he said is common knowledge for those us in the open source world, but it got me thinking more about how companies and communities interact. I won’t duplicate everything here, but I wrote several paragraphs with my thoughts on this session on the Olliance Blog.
Linus Torvalds. The Linux Kernel Roundtable was one of the most popular sessions with a room full of geeks listening to Linus and other kernel developers talk about various Linux kernel topics.
Moblin. This was a hot topic at the event, and I’m not just saying this because Intel is a client. People were talking about Moblin in hallways and presenters kept mentioning them in sessions. This was a Linux Foundation event, and Moblin was turned over to the Linux Foundation by Intel in early April, so that could explain at least some of the buzz.
Fun. We had the Fake Linus Torvalds contest where Matt Asay came out ahead of Dan Lyons (the famous FakeSteveJobs guy). We even had an appearance from Steve Ballmer, or maybe it was Jeremy Allison as Steve Ballmer at the Golden Penguin Bowl, which was filled with funny geek trivia and a live helicopter battle.
If you want to know more about LinuxCon, you can read my longer review of the event.
Community Managers and Bloggers: The Face of Your Company
When you are talking about online communities or social media efforts for a company, you need to think very carefully about who you put in charge. In particular, this applies to community managers, bloggers, and the people running your social media accounts (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) The people in these positions become the face of your company. You want someone who will do a great job of representing your company and who fits well within your corporate culture. In short, an actual full-time employee of your company.
Earlier this week, I ran across a blog post by Jackie Huba about The Intern Trap where she says:
“Would you let a company intern:
- Man your customer service line?
- Be your receptionist?
- Be your spokesperson to the Wall Street Journal?
- Be the main contact for your most talkative customers?
If not, then why do companies put, or think of putting, interns in charge of their social media presence?”
Quoted from Church of the Customer Blog
This doesn’t just apply to interns, either. I often see companies put consultants, public relations firms, and other outsiders in these key positions. As a result, the face of the company is someone who isn’t even a company employee.
These conversations come up frequently with clients. In general, I encourage clients to put employees in these key positions rather than putting someone from the outside into a role that has so much visibility. This doesn’t mean that your interns, public relations firms, and consultants can’t be involved, but I prefer to see them helping out behind the scenes rather than being front and center. Have them work on your content roadmap for your social media efforts, find data or quotes for a blog post, or provide feedback and suggestions for making a blog post better. Consultants can provide advice and mentoring for your community manager rather than managing the community themselves.
I also think that there are a few exceptions to this rule, especially when you are dealing with very large companies. In those cases, having someone on a contract basis or as an intern step up to help with some minor community moderation can help during times where you need a little help, but not enough for a full-time employee. Likewise, big companies with dozens of bloggers can bring in someone to write a few posts in their area of expertise as a way to add some additional content under the direction of company employees. In these cases, you are bringing someone in as a supporting role, rather than putting them in a position where they become the face of the company.
I’d love to hear some examples if your company has tried this (successfully or unsuccessfully).
Online Community Metrics
This morning, I ran across a list of social media metrics on the Page One PR site, and I realized that I spend quite a bit of time talking to clients about success metrics, but I haven’t spent much time writing about metrics on this blog. In a previous post, I talked about my general guidelines for online community success metrics:
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.
In other words, your success metrics are a small number of items that you use to determine success or failure over a period of time. You should measure many other items that you can use as indicators for what works or what doesn’t work, but make sure you separate what you are measuring because it helps you do your job vs. what metrics you are using to determine success.
Now, let’s get more specific. Online community efforts, including social media, can be very difficult to measure. I try to focus success metrics across three areas: awareness, membership, and engagement.
Awareness
Awareness is focused on getting people to notice your community and visit it to learn more. I typically use a general purpose website analytics package, like Google Analytics, to track visits to the community or page views as my primary measure of awareness.
Membership
Membership looks at the people who are paying attention to your community on an ongoing basis. These are the people who take the time to sign up and join the community as members. I usually use the number of new members or the total number of members of the community as the success metric for membership.
Engagement
Engagement is all about the conversations that people are having in your community and their interactions with other community members. The number of discussions, replies, or comments are typical ways to measure engagement in a community.
While awareness, membership, and engagement are long-term metrics, you should also have success metrics for shorter-term programs that also tie back into your overall community metrics. For example, you will want to keep track of when you do any kind of outreach (online or offline) and watch relevant success metrics for your community both before and after the outreach activity. This additional measurement will help you determine what methods of outreach work best for your community and will determine the success or failure of a shorter-term program.
While the success metrics mentioned above are geared toward online communities, you can use a similar approach for social media efforts. Awareness could include mentions of your company or product name across various social media sites (Twitter, blogs, video, etc.) Membership might include Twitter followers or RSS feed subscribers for your blog. Engagement could include comments on your blog posts and Twitter @replies.
Exactly how you will measure these success metrics depends entirely on your community dynamics, the community platform capabilities, and what activities in the community are the most important for your members. Don’t get too caught up in the examples I’ve listed here. The important part is finding a way to measure all three of these areas: awareness, membership, and engagement. Exactly how you will determine success will probably be a little different for each community.
Community Mini Case Study: Whiffies on Twitter
I’ve been spending some time hanging out at several of the Portland food carts over the past couple of weeks getting to know some of the people behind the amazing food. Raven Zachary recently introduced me to Whiffies Fried Pie Cart on Hawthorne, and I started getting to know Gregg Abbott, the man behind those addictive little pies. The Twitter account for @whiffies is very community focused with many replies to conversations, retweets of other interesting posts, and is way less self-promotional than you might expect from a business. The first time I talked to Gregg, we were in a group of techies; we had our iPhones out; we were Tweeting; and we chatted about several obscure location-based technologies that few people outside of the tech community have ever heard of. When I asked him about his background, I expected him to say that he was a freelance programmer / designer or some other web-based profession and was surprised to learn that he’s been working in the food industry. At that point, I wanted to learn more about how he came to Twitter and what it has done for his business. Here’s a quick email interview with Gregg.
Dawn: A quick Google search for Gregg Abbott shows that you have been involved in online communities and social networks for a while. How did you get interested in social networking, and how did you use these technologies prior to opening Whiffies?
Gregg: When it comes to social networking via the web it’s really all I’ve ever done. I feel like I’m from the very first generation who grew up with ‘net social networking. When I was 12 years old you could find me on prodigy all night chatting and being social with other like minded people. My community has always sprung from the web. It’s funny to me because the major social networks, let’s take Facebook for example, are simply duplicating AOL circa 1994. Here’s a place to chat and be social while playing fun games and goofing around. I guess what I’m saying is this has been a huge part if my life for some time, and I really enjoy the fact that the number of users has increased so much lately. It has given me a whole lot of opportunities to expand my social circles.
[Dawn’s note: this is where I remind myself that I am not as young as I think I am, since I grew up before this generation who grew up having Internet access.]
Dawn: You have been very active on Twitter under the @whiffies account when you opened the new food cart. How has Twitter or other online technologies helped your business?
Gregg: Twitter has been amazing at connecting me with great people. When I’ve had questions or needed help with something Twitter has rarely failed to help me find what I need. The coolest thing about Twitter, and this is gonna come back to the barn raising analogy (I’m obsessed with Anabaptists forgive me) is the sense of community that it invokes. It’s amazing!! Coming into this I was way more cynical and jaded about people. The truth is, people (especially early adopting tech people) really want to help one another. Every chance they’ve gotten they’ve showed up and been amazing. It’s so inspirational to see. I think (maybe it’s hope) that Twitter is gonna help us move past the bowling alone phase in American culture. For a small business starting out often times the hardest thing is getting the word out to the community about the product and service that you offer. Twitter has been amazingly helpful in overcoming this hurdle. It’s also given me a way to connect with my customers directly. In restaurants (and food carts) on of the biggest obstacles you face is unhappy clients not giving feedback. As a restaurateur, getting honest feedback helps you create better products and a better experience. I think people are a little more comfortable giving feedback to a. someone who seems friendly and receptive and b. through an electronic intermediate. Twitter let’s me have real dialog (awesome to say about <140 character tweets) with people and helps me create better products and a better service.
Dawn: What are your tips for other new businesses who want to do something similar?
Gregg: Tips I have for other businesses are:
- Join the community (this is key and is gonna play into all the rest.)
- Offer your help anywhere you can.
- Don’t be afraid to ask for help.
- Buy a new cart, not a used one.
- Go down and talk to everyone you can in the carts. They’re all super awesome and super helpful.
Dawn: What made you decide to open a fried pie cart and what are your evil plans for world domination of the fried pie market (or maybe Portland domination)?
Gregg: My dad and I have been kicking the idea around for some time. He makes baked handpies in his catering business and being a little bit gluttonous I thought let’s fry these puppies up and see what happens and Whiffies was born.
Community Case Study Summary
As you can see from his tips in the third question, this is a community-oriented guy with a combination of online and offline community. Friends have been teasing me over the past week about my Whiffies pie addiction, but it isn’t just about the pies, it’s about the community. We go down to the carts to hang out and talk to people while we eat our pie, and within a few minutes of tweeting about going, we usually end up with a few friends at the carts hanging out with us.
While I focused on Whiffies for this mini case study, many of the other food carts in Portland (@koifusion, @pdxyarp, etc.) are also embracing Twitter in a good way with a focus on community, instead of spamming us with self-promotional tweets. It’s great to see traditional businesses jumping onto Twitter in a way that makes me want to follow them rather than wanting to run away screaming.
Whiffies is open from 8pm – 3am Tuesday through Saturday if want to check them out. Make sure you say hi to Gregg while you’re there.
Impromptu Digital, Twitter Barn Raising CubeSpace Benefit Party at Whiffies
I was exchanging some direct messages this morning with Gregg aka @whiffies after my earlier CubeSpace post, and he is generously offering to do an old fashioned barn raising for CubeSpace this evening sometime around 11pm at the Whiffie’s pie cart on Hawthorne and 12th. He has 40 sweet and savory pies left over from last night along with lemonade and iced tea. He’s willing to donate all of the proceeds from the evening to CubeSpace. It’s a 3 day weekend, and tomorrow is a holiday, so you really don’t have any excuse not to join us. Don’t be late, we only have 40 pies!
We’re also looking for a DJ who wants to come out and entertain us for the evening for a good cause. Ping me if you are interested.
Here are the details:
Time: Sometime after 11PM. Look for a tweet from @whiffies later tonight for a more exact start time.
Location: Food Carts on Hawthorne and 12th
Come hang out & buy a pie or some lemonade in support of CubeSpace
RSVP on Upcoming
CubeSpace: The Importance of Community
Officially, CubeSpace is a local for profit business in Portland, OR with two sides to the business. They started as a coworking space where people can work or hold meetings with all of the amenities of a traditional office, but they recently expanded into consulting where they bring groups of freelancers together to bid on bigger projects. Both of these efforts generate revenue for the CubeSpace business.
Unofficially, they are the adopted home of the Portland technology community. They donate their space in the evenings to user groups and other technology gatherings without asking anything in return. They have generously let me hold Legion of Tech meetings, community manager meetups, and they have been a great partner in many of the bigger local events, like WordCamp, CyborgCamp, BarCamp, Startupalooza, and more.
Earlier this week, they put out an open letter to the community letting us know that they were having financial difficulties that would likely result in eviction from their space and / or bankrupcy. I was personally very concerned and sad and outraged by the way US Bank was responding and worried about losing CubeSpace and about the impact this would have on so many of my friends, particularly Eva and David. Most of my friends were experiencing similar emotions, and there was an outpouring of support and offers of help from far and wide within the technology community in Portland.
The community gathered online and offline to find ways to help. We were discussing CubeSpace in the halls between WebVisions sessions, at lunch, and everywhere else we gathered in real life. People started Tweeting with the #savecubespace hashtag. Several ways to help have been emerging: a site where you can donate money (they have raised over $5000 so far), an auction, and more. Various ways to help have been included in the comments of the Silicon Florist post.
All of these activities generated a huge amount of activity on Twitter, which attracted the mainstream media. Stephanie Strickland start putting in calls to US Bank for comment and later KGW did a news story about the incident. Mike Rogoway wrote a great article for the Oregonian. The grassroots support on Twitter led to mainstream media coverage, which finally got US Bank to the table to provide CubeSpace with some options.
Community Case Study
This level of support from the community, both online and offline, is not typical behavior when you are talking about a for profit organization having financial difficulties. Had this been a place where people rented office space and went home at the end of the day, few people would have cared if they went out of business. Because Eva and David have always been so generous with their space for the technology community – letting community user groups meet at CubeSpace for no charge, the community wants to give something back to them. They have been so generous with the community, and now that they are struggling, the community wants to help them.
They didn’t create the Portland technology community, but they joined the community and became active participants. They gave generously to the community, and now the community wants to give back. This is the way strong communities respond when one of their own is in trouble. This isn’t the first time the community has bailed someone out of a tight spot; one of the best examples was the Bram Pitoyo bike fund when his bike was stolen last year. Eva and David are in trouble, and the community is pulling together to help. I think the past few days in particular speak to the strength of the Portland technology community.
Next Steps
Eva and David have quite a bit to think about this weekend as they weigh their options and decide which path to take. I expect that they will need to take a hard look at their business model and cost structure if they decide to continue with CubeSpace to avoid ending up in a similar situation again. Personally, I think that they should get rid of some more cubicles and increase the flexible space or provide bigger, dedicate office spaces to small companies. So many of us left the corporate world to escape the cubicles and aren’t eager to jump back into one.
I have also been holding off on making any donations until I see how I can best help. Donating money isn’t always the best option depending on which path they choose, so I want to make sure that I can help in a way that would be most productive. Whatever Eva and David decide to do, I will be there to support them in any way that I can as a member of the community that they have been so much a part of. I wish them the best of luck whatever they decide to do.
Update June 16: The end result is that CubeSpace has decided to shut down their business, but I wish them the best of luck in future endeavors.
Companies and Communities Presentation Materials from WebVisions
Thank you to everyone who came to my presentation at WebVisions this morning! For anyone who missed my presentation or for people wanting a copy of the materials, I’ve uploaded them to SlideShare.
ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management
I was lucky to get a review copy of the new ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management, which was just released this morning. I was also interviewed for the report, so you can find tidbits from my experience sprinkled throughout the report.
My favorite thing about this report is that it isn’t just a PDF document, it comes with a companion site, the Community Management Aggregator, which provides great ongoing resources for people interested in community management. It has a custom search engine for the best community management content along with 3-10 new community management articles per day from some of the leading community management practitioners. I’m already finding great content that I hadn’t yet discovered on my own throughout this companion site. It also has other useful tidbits including OPML files with lists of great blogs, links to Twitter accounts for the top community management thought leaders, and more.
The report is also really interesting. It contains basic information, discussions about whether you really need a community manager, return on investment for your community, job descriptions, dealing with difficult members, interviews and more. The report also has plenty of links to other content, links to reference materials, and other pointers to great content. You can also download a free sample section of the report to get a better feel for the type of content being included.
The whole package is priced at $299. You can learn more about the report on the ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management page.
Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:
Twitter Doesn't Get Community
For those of you who don’t know, yesterday Twitter made a “small settings update” that prevents you from seeing any @replies from your friends that reply to a user that you aren’t following. I’m not going to explain the details, since ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch did a great job of covering the change. You can read those two articles if you want the background information.
What I do want to talk about is how this is a symptom of a greater problem that has the potential to destroy Twitter if they don’t make some changes to the way they operate. But first, a history lesson. @replies on Twitter evolved out of a community groundswell where people started using @replies to reply to other people on Twitter. Over time, Twitter realized that this was a great way for people to make public replies, and they began officially supporting this community driven feature. Now, they are taking something the community built and making it significantly less useful. Twitter doesn’t get community.
This is very dangerous for Twitter, since the service only survives because of the community of people who use Twitter. By all technical measures, Identica / Laconica is a superior platform for Twitter-like conversations, but few people use it. Why? Because the community is already on Twitter, and getting a community to move to a new service is close to impossible unless the community isn’t being supported. Missteps, like this one, have the potential to drive the community away from Twitter. If the community moves away from Twitter and to a new service, Twitter will die, because without the community, Twitter has nothing.
I’m not one to complain without some suggestions for how to improve, so here’s my suggestion. Twitter needs to hire a kick-ass community manager. I’m sitting here at the Community 2.0 conference, and there are plenty of fantastic community managers for Twitter to choose from. A great community manager can be an advocate and voice for the community from within Twitter to help the company understand how it’s actions will be received by the community and help Twitter avoid disasters like this most recent one.
Related Fast Wonder Blog posts: