August 2009
7 posts
Thanks for sharing, Scott. It’s funny, this piece of full of the kinds of advice I’ve been giving for years — don’t be overcontrolling, expand your target audience as widely as possible, consider fan sites allies rather than competitors — but it still left me a bit uneasy.
To cite just a few things I’d contest either in fact or implication:
“These...
Timely question — I wrote a blog post just a couple weeks ago about how to cultivate superusers on your community, and I think many of the principles apply to advocates out on the social web as well: Superusers: Step by Step.
I think the main thing to understand is that advocates aren’t generally looking for rewards of monetary value — and often such rewards are unwelcome or...
Good question! Policy of course is always company-specific — you policies should reflect your company values and culture, and should be in agreement with your any other guidelines you provide to employees (e.g., confidentiality agreements).
Having said that, I think it’s good to look at policies created by other companies to get an idea of the kinds of things you may want to...
Ah Kevin, you beat me to it!
Just to add a little more color to that — most of our customers focus less on how much time users spend on the community, and more on how much participation (posts, kudos, blog comments, etc.) and usage (logins, page views, message views, etc.) there is in general. There are exceptions — ad-supported sites might be one of them — but...
To add to Kevin’s reponse, I think Barnes & Noble has done a terrific job of integrating the community with their website so that any visitor to bn.com is aware of them. My experience is that lack of promotion is the number one reason that communities fail — customers just aren’t aware of the social features you are offering them. Therefore it’s rarely a problem of...
One thing people often miss about 90-9-1 is that it’s only a point-in-time measure — where only 10% participate within, say, a 30-day period, you are typically engaging a larger percentage of your target audience time. That is to say, the 10% participating at any time is never exactly the *same* 10%.
If you want to get a sense of what percentage of your audience might engage over...
Thanks for the question. It’s important to note that most of our customers use a web analytics package in combination with our community platform. They want the same visibility over our pages that they have over the rest of their website, and that can easily be accomplished by placing a beacon on our pages.
However, our platform isn’t just a series of webpages — it’s...
July 2009
4 posts
Companies do indeed participate in the conversations in their communities, and my experience says that your customers expect it. You do, however, have to think about how you want to participate.
I get this question so often that I wrote a blog post about it last year. I called it “Three Ways to Show Up.” I think you’ll find it helpful!
Ei-lunT wrote: A question asked...
What Jake said.
Ok, maybe I do have a few additional tips of my own.:) I like the 5 of 5 structure also — it’s a common way to avoid the problem you encounter when you try to create 20 or more ranks, but still want to make then “legible” to users in terms of “what’s higher than what.”
I also wrote a blog post yesterday that had a few tips for ranks...
Gail Williams of Salon and The WELL invited people this week to share their thoughts on the subject of “influencers,” and recaps the contributions here. Following are some simple tips I share with companies launching online communities about how to cultivate “superusers” — that group of active users from which influencers and advocates can emerge.
PRE-LAUNCH
...
If you’ve been to our home page this morning, you know that today we’ve introduced Lithium Social CRM, the next generation of our solution for customer communities. It’s been many months in the making. In many ways, it’s the natural evolution of everything we’ve done and everything we’ve learned for the past 10 years. To mark the occasion, I thought I’d...
April 2009
2 posts
Mike, thanks for the good words. I don’t care whether people call themselves “experts,” frankly. And lots of neophytes in a particular business segment can just mean it’s a healthy segment. But I do think companies can work more effectively with their consultants if they ask the right questions from the start.
Randy, those are good additions to the list. I...
You may not know this, but there are six magic words that make phony social media experts disappear. As with all such incantations, you have to get the words exactly right. Here’s how it goes:
“Show me five things you’ve done.”
If your expert is still there, feel free to explain what you mean. You can explain that you’d like to see examples of social media...
February 2009
1 post
Today we introduced Lithium Insights, a set of analytic solutions focused on enterprise online communities. The first two solutions in the set are the Community Health Index (or CHI), and Lithium Lifecycle Benchmark Services. I think these solutions represent a significant leap forward in the way online communities are measured, and I thought I’d give you a little insight into what...
January 2009
1 post
A colleague of mine got an interesting question this week: what is the benefit for business-to-business (B2B) communities if being open versus being closed?
I often preach the value of open communities in my work with customers. In my presentation last year at the Community 2.0 Conference, I included lack of openness as one of the “warning signs” that a community effort is at risk...
December 2008
4 posts
Paul Greenberg has a terrific article on ZDNet this morning: CRM 2009 - Companies to Watch For - Second Verse, Different Than the First. Paul has long been waving the “social CRM” banner, and his summary of where CRM vendors stand — and where they are going — in 2009 pays close attention to the integration of social elements into the CRM suite.
There aren’t good...
Two pieces of advice I’d give, particularly if your community is new or getting ready to launch:
Don’t assume that rewards of monetary value are the only thing that matters.
People often think that they can drive more activity by introducing valuable rewards from the get-go. Worse, they often think that they must offer these rewards in order to get people to interact.
If...
Sean is exactly right — the measurement process starts with goals. If you take Sean’s framework of “satisfaction/loyalty/affinity,” you might think about measurement this way:
Satisfaction
To what extent are our influencers driving satisfaction?
Sean noted one measure of this — how many people do we have in our forums helping other users, how many questions are...
Sean’s on the right track here. We know that 1% or fewer of the folks who you attract to your community will become very active in that community — in other words, have some disproportionate influence. The percentage is scale-sensitive — it doesn’t scale in a linear way as we look at communities of increasing size, so if you have a large population you may have...
November 2008
12 posts
Last week Jake McKee created a new site, 90-9-1.com, to spur debate on the principle of Participation Inequality best described, in my opinion, by Jakob Nielsen in his Alertbox newsletter back in 2006. I wrote about this back in 2006 as well, and I don’t think I’d change anything I said back then. However, I would add a few things today, particularly in response to McKee’s...
Forrester’s Jeremiah Owyang is trying to aggregate site usage stats for social networks — useful stuff.
He mentions that his post from back in January on MySpace and Facebook stats gets considerable traffic. I’ve noticed (actually, Scott noticed) that a post I did back in December 2006 on the same subject is still one of the most highly-viewed pages on the Lithosphere. I...
Another note - re country differences, the Universal McCann study that Li uses as the source for her pyramid has some pretty useful data — for example, 92% of South Korean Internet users read blogs versus some 60% in the US.
Message Edited by JoeC on 11-10-2008 07:01 AM
I agree Mark — and you remind me that I neglected to mention in this post that Li and Bernoff have created an online technographic profile tool that allows you to plug in your the age range, country, and gender of your target population and generate a chart like the above for your specific audience. For example, if your target pop is 18-24, the percentage of creators rises to 42% from the...
While I agree with Dave the the principles are the same, there are certainly differences you need to keep in mind in implementation. Here are a couple:
Scale: The target audience in B2B is often smaller than the target audience in B2C. Audience size can and should affect your technology choices. Something that succeeds with MySpace’s millions of users might not work for a B2B firm...
I think the best way to convince people to incorporate social media is to a) find out what their business objectives are, and b) put together a case for achieving those objectives with social media, illustrated by successful examples from other companies.
But there is a general argument for social media in marketing as well.
First, ask them if they believe the Internet is important to your...
I’m a big proponent of making your community efforts as broad as possible, including the creation of groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, and other sites. However, if (like most companies that use Lithium) you already have a company website and people using that website today, there are a number of advantages to making your website the home to your community:
It’s what customers expect....
Sounds like you have a community up and running and want to get others in the company more engaged. Three things I’d recommend:
Harvest some customer opinions from the community and pass them around the organization — most people really want to hear what customers are saying.
Communities are often one of the largest drivers of traffic to the company website — do some analysis...
I have a saying the I stole from Edward Tufte when I took one of his design seminars many years ago:
“Every design project should begin as a research project.”
That is, if you are thinking about creating a community for your company, go out and look at what other companies are doing. A great place to start is the customers tab on our website, where you can find links to more...
Typically, community managers and moderators are based either in customer support or marketing. Sometimes, when “moderation” includes providing technical assistance, moderators may also be based in the product development organization.
I’m attending Defrag in Denver this week and enjoying the opportunity to listen and learn. One thing I thought you might be interested to see is a new version of the participation hierarchy that Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff presented in Groundswell. Used to be a ladder, now it’s a pyramid.
Groundswell version:
Charlene’s new version, as presented at Defrag today:
...
You are correct, sir.
Identifying a search graph is easy — it’s always something of a hockey stick since you need to reach critical mass in content before they searches become useful.
Registrations are easy if you know they are always relatively flat in comparison with other metrics — and also more subject to strong spikes from email or other outreach efforts.
Posts are...
October 2008
4 posts
I should add, if this isn’t obvious, that these graphs are from successful communities. That’s why there are commonalities. Unsuccessful communities are typically unsuccessful in their own way.:)
One of the great things about being a software-as-a-service company is all the data we have about community performance. We have the very first message that ever contributed by the first Lithium customer almost ten years ago, and complete performance data for every community since then — which today mean hundreds of communities covering a wide range of types, size, and age. I can look at...
Two data points in a Gartner Group press release issued last week have gotten a lot of attention:
60 percent of Fortune 1000 companies will connect to or host some kind of online community by 2010. By 2010, more than 50 percent of companies that have established an online community will fail to establish mutual purpose, ultimately eroding customer and company values.
The research was...
Juniper Networks has done some really neat promotions around Accepted Solutions, include a video introduction to the feature and some monthly incentives. You can see them if you scan their Announcements board for subject lines referencing Accepted Solutions.
Also, on the Blackberry Forums, some superusers have begun to use a signature file that encourages other users to accept their solutions....
September 2008
7 posts
Now that you mention it, Laura, there are a few others that are great for keeping up with emerging trends. One (or rather two) that I like are Dion Hinchcliffe’s blogs on ZDNet and Social Computing Magazine.
Hi James -
It’s the latter - Elizabeth just got to those initial posts before everyone else - as you can see from her timestamp!
If it matters to you that the expert’s response come directly after a question — and I can see why it might — you might choose a configuration that many companies use for expert events. They simply configure that board so that users can ask a...
A few thoughts on community names:
Even if your community focuses on support, I recommend never using that word in the community name or forum names. For some reason, many users who see that word automatically think “direct support,” and as a result you’ll get many more complaints on the order of, “I posted my question an hour ago — where is the company with my...
Good question and good responses. Layla, in terms of community growth I usually recommend that communities start by measuring seven things:
Posts
Page views
Registrations
Searches
Time to Response
Posts per Board
Top Posters
The goal is to cover the full spectrum of community usage. Posts are obviously key — no content, no community — but since most community users never...
You’re welcome, Mike. You make an excellent point that promotion is not a single thing, it’s a combination of things, including email outreach and good web site placement, and starting with a prominent link on the home page. Few enterprise communities succeed without it. Some companies do so poorly on promotion that they never get a sufficient number of people to even visit the...
Thanks, guys. Mark, I agree that PM (private messaging) exchanges between community managers and members are an important part of “showing up,” particularly for those 1% of users who are most active. A lot of CMs experience the downside you describe too - users who will simply PM you for the techical assistance the should be getting from their peers in the forums. Most of them...
You’ve got some good ones there, Roxy. Here are a few others I read these days:
Bill Johnston: Online Community Strategy
Conversationsmatter
ReadWriteWeb
Headshift
Community 2.0
Ross Mayfield’s Weblog
Social Media World The Social Customer Manifesto
Emergence Marketing
The Social
August 2008
3 posts
For an emerging practice like online community building, the most useful and practical knowledge isn’t found in books or whitepapers or articles or blog posts. Instead, it is widely distributed among the growing number of practitioners, spread among hundreds or thousand of companies, who are doing the work of community building every day.
I meet lots of community practitioners in my...
Thanks for the good words, Colton, and congratulations on the promotion!
The conversation on failing online communities and social networks continues on blogs and news sites around the web.
In these stories and in comments from readers, you’ll find much good advice, some that is vague or harmless, and some that is outright wrong. I sympathize with any company out there trying to harvest some actionable steps from this bewildering welter of data.
Back in May, I...
July 2008
3 posts
testing
I found this blog post very amusing: Corporate Social Networks Are a Waste of Money, Study Finds. In the post, Marshall Kirkpatrick from ReadWriteWeb cites a WSJ.com article by Ben Worthen about a recent study conducted by Beeline Labs, Deloitte and the Society of New Communications Research. According to Wall St. Journal coverage of Moran’s study, “Thirty-five percent of the...
Testing Tumblr
Testing Tumblr for adding my Lithium blog to Friendfeed.