We’re all social creatures, and we thrive on the interactions of others, in fact, these interactions are the primary drivers for troublemakers in communities.

I’ve read stories about how babies that are given all the proper medical attention, food, shelter to deem them ‘healthy’ whither away to near death if they don’t get human contact and love and care. The same applies to prison, perhaps one of the more dreaded punishments is sending inmates to the ‘hole’ for isolation from all social contact. POWs can muster the strength to survive knowing that a series of Morse code taps can signal to fellow inmates that they’re ok and cared about. How does this apply to online communities?

[The ‘Bozo’ Feature renders the troublemakers’ activities invisible to everyone else, naturally severing what they most crave from others –attention and reactions]

One of my primary coverage areas is on community platforms (also known as white label social networks) that are used by brands to deploy their own social features on their corporate domain. I’ve come across both Mzinga and Pluck that offer this feature, leave a comment below if you also have this feature.

Community managers have a few options when dealing with troublemakers, the first is to take them on head on, either in private or public, sometimes it leads them to banning them. Banning them (removing their account) often doesn’t solve many issues, instead they may choose to create new accounts, or figure out how to cause additional trouble in subvert ways.

Some community managers who can’t deal any further with these troublemakers are left to only one option, by rendering the troublemaker as a “Bozo” using the communtiy software. What’s the “Bozo” feature? It renders the troublemaker invisible to everyone else.

Troublemakers thrive on the attention they get from others and enjoy stirring up fights, but they won’t know that no one else can see them, and therefore assume everyone is ignoring them, or their ploys hold no weight. As a result, they’ll slowly move away, sometimes never realizing that they’ve been labeled a “Bozo”. This gives the community manager a way to defuse the situation, in a non-confrontational manner, allowing for the troublemaker to quietly move on their own.

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Above Image: Gartner’s Generation V Quadrant, found via Marketing Charts.

Gartner: Generation Virtual not defined by demographics
Gartner has recently published research on the topic of “Generation Virtual” (Generation V) which essentially define as two things: 1) This generation isn’t specified by demographics (age) but instead by technology usage. 2) There are four major behaviors

Gartner suggests that Generation V isn’t a demographic categorization, but instead behavioral:

“Unlike previous generations, Generation Virtual (also known as Generation V) is not defined by age — or gender, social demographic or geography — but is based on demonstrated achievement, accomplishments and an increasing preference for the use of digital media channels to discover information, build knowledge and share insights.”

This is an interesting notion, but I’d suggest that having a demographic overlay is actually very important. First of all, demographics are how brands develop personas of who they are trying to reach, bucketing all internet contributors into one classification may be too broad. Secondly, within Generation V, demographics influences the different tools they use. For example, youth may be more inclined to participate in Club Penguin, while an older professional may be more inclined to participate in Linkedin or Xing –demographics do matter. We focus on Social Technographics, which is also behavioral yet closely tied to demographics (age, country, gender, etc).

Gartner: Four major behaviors with Generation Virtual
Secondly, Gartner focuses on four different behavior types: creators, contributors, opportunities, and lurkers:

“Gartner has identified four levels of engagement within Generation V, addressing both the extent to which customers will engage with other customers, as well as the level of engagement needed from businesses to enable the community. The four levels of engagement include: creators, contributors, opportunists, and lurkers.”

This is a helpful segmentation, it indicates that while Generation V composes of a movement of those participating, there are different levels to each behavior. One suggestion is to forgo the term “lurker” (reminiscent of someone standing in the shadows) and instead focus on “spectator”. We note that there are other behaviors beyond the four listed, such as creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators, and inactives. Furthermore we do not view these behaviors as mutually exclusive, a creator on one site could be inactive on another. They suggest only a limited number of activity per each behavior:

“Up to 3 percent of individuals will be creators, providing original content and can be advocates that promote your product and services.

Between 3 percent and 10 percent of individuals will be contributors, essentially followers, who add to the conversation, but don’t initiate it. They can recommend products and services as customers move through a buying process, looking for purchasing advice.

Between 10 percent and 20 percent of individuals will be opportunists, who can further contributions regarding purchasing decisions. Opportunists can “add value” to a conversation that’s taking place, while walking through a considered purchase.

Approximately 80 percent of individuals will be lurkers (and all users start as such), essentially spectators, who reap the rewards of online community input, but only absorb what is being communicated. However, they can implicitly contribute and validate indirectly reporting the value from the rest of the community.”

I’ve not read the full report to get the context (but would like to) but his coverage seems to slant the CRM side. I believe it’s important to note that demographics indeed influence behaviors, see this technographic profile tool, and you’ll quickly notice different behaviors, with an increase in adoption from those younger –particularly see the US charts.

Gartner’s Analyst Adam Sarner does an excellent article featured in Forbes that lists more, it’s a good read with some very practical recommendations. I hope to meet Adam someday (see his Gartner profile), and discuss communities more in detail.

To Consider: Demographics do matter
In summary, while this breakdown of “Generation V’ is certainly telling of where things are headed, demographics are critical, as behaviors and where they participate will radically differ.

As an analyst at Forrester Research primarily covering social networks and communities for interactive marketers, it’s confirmation to hear of other analyst firms discussing my same coverage area. For some, it may seem counter-intuitive for me to discuss about another firm’s work, but it’s important to me that I provide helpful information to my network, regardless of source, and hopefully they’ll continue to trust me and come back to me –even when I send them away.

Update: There’s more conversation on Friendfeed. Carter Lusher (analyst watcher) is impressed we can have a civil discussion, why couldn’t we? Also, I’ve made some edits to this blog, post-publication around the area of indicating that our technographics is tied to both behavior and demographics, and discussing how our behaviors (creators, critics, etc) are not mutually exclusive to provide additional explanation.

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One of my most popular diatribes is my rant on the irrelevant corporate website, in summary, I suggest a gap between the reality of the public conversation and the biased marketese on company websites. Today, I’m starting to see more websites evolve, from Sun’s aggregation of public blog posts, to many companies launching social network features for their site.

Two of my former colleagues, Carlos Soares, and my former manager Peter Simonsen (Update: other team members include Jim Price, project leader, and Suzie Im, web designer extraordanaire) are now spearheading the web efforts at Cadence, and have launched a new website that puts the community front and center right on the homepage. You’ll find headline aggregation of corporate bloggers on the homepage, as well as a link to a budding community forum. They’ve organized blog and community discussions by topic area, making it easier for folks to find information. Recently, they hired Tom Diederich, as the community manager, sounds like they’ve got their work cut out for them.

Above: Cadence prominently features blog posts from employees, as well as one click links to community forums

Why community for Cadence? Their description says they “Provides front-to-back design tools and services for all aspects of semiconductor design”. Essentially, a developer community of engineers is who they are often going to serve, as such, developers will tend to communicate, ask and answer questions, and self-support each other. I’d guess this is a ’supporting’ (forums) strategy followed by ‘talking’ (blogs) objective, using Groundswell terminology.

Above: Although just getting started, the forum is seeded with topics, has member profiles, as well as tags and unanswered questions.

A deeper look into the forum features you’ll see on the right nav a listing of unanswered questions, as well as ‘popular tag’ content modules. The former to encourage self-support from members, and the latter will help identify popular topics in the community. Also you’ll find a rating and ranking system for popular discussions, such as this comment marked three stars.

What’s promising is the ability to leave comments on any of the blog posts, or within the forums, all just one or two clicks from the corporate webpage. I asked Carlos Soares “How do you deal with negative comments” and he responded: “Comments are pre-moderated. There are terms and conditions that people who leave comments should abide by. If off-topic we may address it directly with the user leaving a comment or not depending on the nature of the comment (spam, obscene, personal attack, etc.)”

What are some potential next steps for Cadence? To continue to reach to their community by aggregating all of the discussion in their market, not just Cadence centric content. By becoming an industry discussion hub, they could take expand mindshare from other competitors and customers. Examples of this would look like aggregating content from other blogs or forums that are not hosted at the Cadence domain. Perhaps another method is to invite engaged customers to lead blog posts and prominently feature them discussing relevant –and sometimes controversial –discussions on the site. Currently, there is not enough user interaction, most of the forum discussions appear to be pre-seeded by Cadence (a good practice) but Cadence should have a kick start plan, to attract, and promote community members (I addresses this in my Online Community Best Practices Report). Lastly, the forums don’t have social networking features, I highly suspect that engineers will center around specific activities and will want to connect with each other, therefore Cadence forums could evolve to a white label social networking platform.

In any case, this is truly a step in the promise of putting people and the discussions they have in the foreground, let’s revisit this in a few months and see if they community has taken the lead.

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I’m in the unique position that I get to speak to enterprise brands, white label vendors, and now CMS vendors on a regular basis, here’s what I’m seeing:

It’s now quarter 3, and I start research on the big report, the Forrester Wave (learn about the reports) on the Community Platforms (White Label Social Networks) the Vendor Catalog of this space will be published for clients in the coming days. The process, which has been completed for many other markets, is detailed, granular, and will take me over 10 weeks to complete. The results will yield a report that indicate the strength and weaknesses of those vendors for enterprise class interactive marketers.

[Trend watch: Enterprise CMS Vendors to enter the White Label Social Networking Space and offer Community Features and Platforms]

Social Features a Commodity
As I’ve mentioned time and time again, it’s a crowded space in the white label social network space due to low barriers to entry, and commodity features, in fact with 80+ vendors (could be 120+ if I counted insight vendors and collaboration vendors), there’s no shortage of those who will throw their hat into the ring.

Overview: Enterprise Content Management Systems
I’ve started to notice more of the ‘traditional’ CMS and Portal players that already have deep footprints into the corporate web teams that are inching into this space. First, let’s take a historical view, many of these vendors appeared in the late 90s, they offer easy ways to publish online for corporations, often including advanced review workflows, templates, and staging and dev sites. I’ve been on the teams (I’m a former corporate web guy) that have had to implement, manage, or train stakeholders to use these. Next, in the early 2000-2002 we started to see acquisitions into this space by large ERP players: Microsoft acquired CMS which eventually evolved into Sharepoint, EMC acquired Documentum, and other ERP players such as Interwoven, Vignette, Stellent, IBM’s Filenet and LotusNotes, edDot CMS, Xerox’s Docushare, and Saperion started to extend their KM products for public websites. There’s a great list of these vendors from CMS watch.

CMS Vendors sniffing the social space
Fast forward to 2008. With the demand and buzz for social network features, or community offerings, these established CMS/Portal vendors recognize the demand, and see opportunity dollars falling through the cracks. I’ve started conversations with several of the big players to gauge where they are headed. Of course, the conversations don’t end up on this blog (unless they give me permission, or publish first) but it’s quite obvious where things are headed. In fact, see my predictions referenced in a recent Techcrunch article. They won’t be the only ones, we’re starting to get glimmers of social platforms tying to CRM systems too –integration afoot.

Three Options for CMS Vendors
There are at least three ways these large CMS vendors can head:

1) Develop the features and roll out community suites. Acquire new staff to understand this new world (it’s a different skill set than CMS rollout and management). This will involve client side training, consulting, development/design, new metrics packages, and series of recurring support revenue streams.

2) Acquire the successful white social networking vendors that complement their existing offerings. Find a player that digs deep within Fortune 5000 that offers 100k revenues on first year from a solution sell, and 50k for ongoing support and services. Or either find and easy to use vendor that offers few but broad features, and attached advertising streams and develop a media network.

3) Do nothing. Some CMS vendors may be content with their current product offerings to client, and don’t want to jump into a crowded pool and may choose to avoid offering social features to clients. With third party developers offering widgets and embeddable applications, they actually may not have to.

Four Options for White Label Social Networks
Some of these enterprise class vendors (I’ll know more when wave report comes out), it’s likely they will do a few of these, it’s not exclusive, and will have a strong stance to do the following:

1) Stay independent. I could call this ‘do nothing’ but it’s not the case. Like the CMS/Portal space in late 90s, some of these vendors will continue to grow and be stand alone companies, who knows, some may actually become publicly traded companies.

2) Start partnerships. We’re already seeing some of these companies band together such as Mzinga/Prospero, and now Awareness ties data to Sharepoint, this nods to a direction of working with others, or at least having interoperability.

3) Design for acquisition. Some white label vendors have thought this through, and are building their software in the platform or language of another traditional CMS company and are making themselves ripe fruits for acquisitions.

4) Develop flexible architectures. The future of the web is amorphous, therefore some white label vendors will heavily depend on open APIs, Data, and develop or work with widget vendors to let social content be shared and ‘fly’ around the web. Eventually, some of these widget features could easily be embedded into CMS systems, even if they don’t offer these features.

Four Options for Brands
In our recent forecast report, we predicted that the largest growth spend at the enterprise level for social services and products will be social networks. Brands have a few options:

1) Develop their own social software features. I know a few brands (despite me suggesting they buy) are extending their home grown CMS systems to add on social features. For those with large web development teams it makes sense. For others wanting to be fast and flexible, it’s often not an efficient path.

2) Work with a White Label Vendor. Many are choosing to rope in these vendors to develop, train, design, and manage these communities, in most cases they sit ‘off to the side’ of the corporate website and are not integrated with product pages. Of course, this whole discussion excludes marketing efforts on organic social sites like Facebook, MySpace, etc.

3) Wait for CMS vendors. Many brands are just toe-dippin’ into the social space, they are not offering community features, don’t see the point, or have other objectives to fulfill. As a result, they may just wait a few quarters till CMS vendors offer this ability within their existing platforms. Of course, this comes with risk from deploying too late, or not offering features that meet the needs of community members

4) Do nothing. In the end, some brands will choose not to engage customers in community sites, for a variety of reasons such as products or services that are sold to resellers and rebranded, deep technology components that are mainly a b2b sell, or lack of vision to embrace customers.

Watch this emerging trend
Where are we now? We’re at the very beginnings of this journey, with most white labels being around for just a few years, and the established CMS vendors starting to sniff this sector and gather requirements (many are coming to me) we’re clearly at the R&D stage, with some banding development teams to enter this space.

Questions that will be need to be answered by this space:

Will CMS vendors be able to adapt to social features into their legacy systems?

Is the demand from client side strong enough for CMS vendors assert flexibility?

How will these commodity social features be monetized, with everyone having them, how will you differentiate?

Will CMS vendors build, buy, or ignore social features?

When will we see existing internal knowledge management systems integrate these features?

Will the small white label vendors start to get friendly with the CMS space and start to develop an exit strategy?

Are white label vendors building their products for easy integration into CMS vendors?

I’ve been thinking about developing a ’show and tell’ event where both of these vendors can come together for a meet and greet, if I did, would you attend?

Chime in, love to hear you answer these questions I posed above.

Update: Larry Dignan from Zdnet throws in his hat and predicts, in his opinion, the most logical options.

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(Rather than theorize on the Community Pyramid, you can create your own ladder for free on the Technographics Profile Tool)

Respected Don Dodge has an interesting post where he segments communities by a taxonomy of: 1 creators, 10 synthesizers, and 100 consumers.

It’s a good rule of thumb, but it isn’t applicable to all communities. The good news is, there’s no need to theorize over the pyramid shape, as we’ve provided a ladder than you can access now –for free.

For Creators, I’m pretty sure we use the same nomenclature to describe a creator. You can learn from the links below how we define that individual. Don uses the term synthesizers, but doesn’t define it, I’d guess it’s a hybrid of what we define in detail as collectors and critics, but I’d need to know more to find out.

A consumer is likely what we call a Spectator, someone who consumes social content, within a community this of course would equal 100% as he denotes. Lastly, our data isn’t restrictive to one tool only (social networks) but looking at the macro picture of how people behave.

I love working at a Research company, there’s plenty of access to data, fortunately, we’ve made a portion of it available at no cost to you see the Techongraphics Profile Tool to learn more and actually see the REAL percentage numbers of a creator by age, regions, and gender.

You’ll then be able to see how many creators are available by each of those demographics, and how many are critics, collectors, and joiners. The total percent adds up to more than 100% in some cases, as you can be in more than one rung (except for inactive, of course)

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How to access Forrester Technographic Data:

First, understand that Social Technographics classifies people according to how they use social technologies, read these 8 slides.

Next, go to the profile tool, and experiment with many of the drop downs and toggles.

Then, you can determine which social media tools to use, based upon understand those you are trying to reach. It’s always dangerous to build your house starting with a hammer (tools), first, figure out who you’re building it for, then build a plan.

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Data comes from the following surveys:

US: Forrester’s North American Social Technographics Online Survey, Q2 2007, 10,010 respondents.

Europe: Forrester’s European Technographics Benchmark Survey, Q2 2007, 24,808 respondents.

Asia Pacific: Forrester’s Asia Pacific Technographics Survey, Q1 2007, 6,530 respondents.

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Ellen M is one of Yelp’s premiere members called Yelp Elite, they are unpaid members that after meeting some requirements are considered “elite”. It’s often baffling for outsiders to understand how community leadership forms, but it’s often not because of their loyalty to the brand, but often due to the appeal to communicate with one’s peers and to gain ’social capital’.

If you’re not familiar with Yelp, it’s a location based review community, which influences which restaurants, businesses, and events people patronize. This is a Groundswell example, as people find information from each other, rather than getting it from an institution like newspapers or restaurant reviewers.

Many brands are trying to figure out how to get their own members to take leadership, and many are trying to emulate Microsoft’s successful MVP program, with varied results. In the quest to understand community leadership, I interviewed Ellen M. who’s one of Yelp’s elite crowd

A bit about Ellen M: First, view her profile on Yelp, She’s very active in Yelp, is a member of the Chicago Elite (Since 2005) and has 251 Friends, has completed 1048 Reviews, hunts and finds new haunts and has 589 “Firsts”, is respected by her peers and has 78 Fans (an influencer), has over 1500 compliments, use media and has 103 Local Photos, submits a few events (3) and has created 28 Lists.

An Interview with a Member of Yelp’s “Elite”, Chicago’s Ellen M:

What does it take to become a member? What rights does it entitle you to?
I was part of the original Elite group in Chicago, after having written about 700 reviews (a whole other story - I was paid a small amount of money to write reviews when the site was in beta, along with a bunch of other yelpers). For most new users, the criteria for Elite is 1) having a photo of yourself, 2) using your real name, 3) writing a bunch of reviews (not sure how many - 100?) and serving as sort of a role model. It entitles me to invitations to Elite events, but that’s about it.

Do restaurants treat you differently?
Once, a nice restaurant offered to have me back for a complimentary dinner after seeing my negative review. Restaurants don’t know I’m a yelp user while I’m there though, unless by some astronomical chance someone recognizes me from my photo (which hasn’t happened yet). I have never mentioned that I write online reviews with the expectation of special treatment.

How does your ranking influence others?
I’m not sure…I don’t think it does influence others.

I used to have an additional badge, “Mod,” which meant I was able to MODify business listing information - it resulted in a lot of people mistakenly thinking that I worked for the site as a Moderator, so I had yelp remove the badge (I was getting a lot of email from people thinking I could reprimand users, etc.). Since then, they’ve dismantled the Mod program entirely.

How does Yelp reward/recognize you?
I get a new Elite badge at the beginning of each year. I’ve gotten several mentions in yelp weekly newsletters. I’m invited to the yelp Elite events, and I attend a few of them per year.

How much does it cost you? (effort, money, time)?
Since I’m well-established in the yelp community, it only requires that I remain an active user, which isn’t difficult. I would expect that new users who are trying to get Elite status would have to spend a good 20 hours or so writing reviews to obtain it.

Why do you do it?
I love to write reviews, but I think the social networking and interaction with yelp friends is what really compels me to continue. There are certain yelp reviewers who are so entertaining that I could probably spend an entire afternoon reading their stuff - way better than television.

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Regarding the question, “does your ranking influence others?” we know from trust research that people trust those like them or peers, far more than anything else.

In a future post, we’ll discuss how restaurants need to do to understand and respond to Yelp, stay tuned.

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The first time we saw this implemented in public was the Dell’s Ideastorm website, where the customers were able to submit their feature and product requests. This ultimately resulted in a Linux box being produced, a pretty drastic change from their long term relationship with Microsoft.

[The future of corporate websites enable customers to submit, define, and vote for next-generation products in collaboration with product teams]

Starbucks has seen the benefits that Dell had, and appears to be using the same Sales Force feature that allows customers to submit, discuss and vote for features, see My Starbucks Ideas.

You can:

See the top rated ideas (punch cards, wifi, are among the top)

Or submit your own idea, I just suggested that ‘rent an office’ be available at select stores

See which ideas get taken up and become products on their blog (FYI: Turn on comments)

What should we expect? A few of these ideas to be put into action, with great fanfare. An increased dialog between company and marketplace, and expect white label social networking sites to start offering these same features. (email me when you see one)

This is just the start folks, where social computing (where individuals who participate socially to build something greater) work together to craft better products, services and experiences for companies. To me, this is one of the ultimate goals of web strategy, as we move away from the irrelevant corporate website.

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I’ve been presenting in public at conferences or webinars my high level findings from my recent research on Online Community Best Practices, the detailed version is on the Forrester site. I interviewed 17 companies and leaned on my experience launching the social media programs at previous companies. You can view the powerpoint on Slideshare.

The next time I’m presenting this is in Mountain View on March 25 (yes it’s open to men too), discount code for $50 off for Web Strategy readers is SNC325.

It seems counter-intuitive for me to share these presentations on the web as I’m often hired to present these to clients or at conferences, or hired for advisory, but in today’s social media world, my presentation has already been filmed, blogged, and talked about around the industry. The real value comes from the explanations and and insight from a researcher presenting their findings.

I’ve noticed an influx of the $100 Flip cameras (many received them free as giveaways), I spotted 1-3 of them in every panel I spoke at at SXSW, as well as half a dozen in the bloghaus. Cell phones have on board video, and can upload to the web in seconds. See, even analyst firms are impacted by changes that social media tools bring us. Information can’t be hidden, it simply hasn’t been published online.

The key is to learn to let go to gain more, learn how to offer additional value that a .PPT or a YouTube video can never fulfill. I look forward to presenting at your event!

Update: I forgot to include “Forum One Networks” as one of the companies included in the report. I can’t update this version (I tried on slideshare) and since it’s already being spread, I’m not going to update it, but for future iterations it will be updated.

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We shouldn’t be surprised that Social Media Strategists know how to share. Forrester was pleased to host the Online Community Roundtable, you can continue the discussion in the Facebook Group.

(Update: I uploaded this video with the Flip Camera, man it’s easy capture, edit and publish with this thing)

Bill Johnston is a community servant (Update: he posts his thoughts from his blog), and I mean that in the best possible way. He organizes events for the Social Media industry that serve those who are practicing, it’s really a very valuable service. Every other month, he organizes the Online Community Roundtable for anyone who’s struggling with the day to day job of reaching to customers using online tools, a different company hosts this event each time. Update: Chris Kenton provides his thoughts from the event, he was expands off the idea of Identity Escrow. Ken Kaplan gives context on his presentation on storytelling, I’d like to see Ken speak more often.

To me, perhaps the most interesting topic was one around the “Future of Social Networks” and Chris Kenton’s historical look at marketing, and how technology has empowered and disabled marketers

This is actually a ‘user group’ or in Forrester terms, what we call a ’support community’ where friends, colleagues, peers (and competitors) come together to share and learn from each other. The size of the event is limited, around 35 yielded quality conversations, any more would have caused fragmentations. Bill is masterful in not letting anyone pitch, and anyone who wants to share puts their name up on the board, here’s the list of presentations.

One social network even got up and told the group that they were having challenges growing in a particular market and asked for opinions and help. A few questions from the crowd asked for demographic information, objectives, and clarification, then a barrage of suggestions from seasoned community folks came back to help, now that’s community.

There’s a “Soft NDA” in place, so if a member wanted something to stay confidential, then all will have to respect this, it leads to greater sharing and trust. Some of those who attended included those from Intel, Webex, CyWorld, Charles and Helen Schwab Organization, Cadence, YouTube, Lithium, Leverage, LiveWorld, Ringcube, Intuit, Symantec, VM Ware, Wyse, Babycenter, Tesla Motors, Joyent, SixApart, On24, ZapTXT and hosted by Forrester. (who did I miss?)

I think I can speak for Charlene, that for us this was a real treat, these are the folks we research for, these are the problems that we’re also trying to find out what works and what doesn’t for. I’d like to to thank Forrester’s Frans V.E. for funding the food and drink, Frank C. for helping drag the tables around, and Joan M, the Foster City office manager for all her work and preparation.

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(Above Graphic: Sean’s suggests that word of mouth will travel through networks at different speeds, and with different accuracy depending on the network. He lists many attributes that will impact the speed of sharing)

Sean O’Driscoll, who did a fantastic job, who has extensive experience managing the Microsoft MVP program has struck out on his own and has launched his own consulting shop Community Group Therapy.

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SAP Salon: Social Media and Online Communities

Key highlights:

To be an effective community professional, you need to walk the talk and use the tools

Google is not a search engine, it’s a reputation tracker

Sean scored high on search engine results for Microsoft Support after a bad story was on Digg.com

Admits there are many buzzwords, yet many forget to look at the bigger picture

Rather than focusing on the Techcrunch/Scoble “Shiny Diamond” to develop a social media strategy

The 5 P’s of Social Media: People, Places, Process, Platform, Patterns

Process is potentially the most important P –but often overlooked

There are more smarter people about your product outside of your company

It’s good and horrible news that it’s easy to publish. Many fractures due to lack of strategy.

Google is the enemy of brand loyalty, if I can find the answer to a question not on your corporate property

Most advocates and influencers are not
helping to help a brand, they are helping other users.

“Pay it forward” a good model and metaphor how a community works

Participation:

Impacts to busienss: Customer Service and Support, Sales and Marketing, Innovation and Product Development

You can’t own the message and the audience is going to change it on their own

Word of Mouth has been a key driver why people buy what they buy, now with access to information through social tools greatly impacts this

Engagement is about brand inclusion, making sure people have their voiced involved

We’ve all seen ugly babies but never had one. We’ve strong attraction to our own products. Uses a MS open source as a case study

Beta is not early enough to get your community involved

If you want raving fans, get affinity, talks about Harley Davidson

Influencer Framework in Web 1.0: Envision and develop, test and release, and sell and support

Suggests that social aspect of employees were only in sell and support aspect, not other areas

Sean had an executive champion, Steve Ballmer

Social graph: as a business strategy we should think about it as

For some reason, webex auto-showed webcams (powerbook users?) which was a potential major hazard for those who did not know they were being streamed at their desk. This needs to be fixed, could be a major embarrassment for folks.

Also the chat room in the webex client was very active, I saw Kevin Marks, Marita, Pistachio and others chiming away. The organizer said this chat room was the one of the most active they’ve ever seen. Twitter was a big recruiter.

There are several graphics that I could not effectively blog to text, I’ll link to the slides if they are published.

When I live blog webinars or conferences (even doing screen grabs), not only does it help everyone else, but it helps me to get smarter. Writing really helps to cement knowledge to actionable work.

Thanks Sean and thanks SAP for hosting this!

Tagged SAP Salon

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Edward Sussman, the President of Mansueto Digital and built the new FastCompany.com has responded to my analysis. He’s done a great job addressing the many points I made, and has responded both on my blog and on his site, where I cross posted.

He’s shared some numbers of growth including activity: “We are approaching 1,000 reader posts a day about business topics raised by our journalists” and member involvement: “Members have set up more than 500 blogs about business.”

I’m going to continue to watch Fast Company as a media company who is embracing the social computing aspect of the future and I encourage you to also watch.

Thank you Ed for being so forthcoming, I will watch with great interest.

Update: How timely, Jemina Kiss asks if UGC is viable for news sites.

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Etsy created this “electronic press release” to show how hand made products are created, shared, sold, and discussed on their community site.

All of the products are hand made and are unique, unlike the mass produced commercial products are sold. Think back a few years, this wasn’t possible, hand made items would be generally limited in distribution to local stores, craft shows, or maybe some type of catalog.

How is Esty different? While Craigslist is more impersonal, Etsy focuses on building community, relationships and even online events (like a virtual craft show). Ebay, which certainly has similar features, doesn’t cater to only these unique handmade items.

Now, the web provides access for anyone to share unique items, and benefit from a global storefront. Expect more of smaller, individual, and customized goods to be created, traded, and sold due to the web.

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Fedora and Data Portability Logos, too similar for comfort. (image via Techcrunch)

Turning over the logo creation to your community
For a few years now, we’ve been saying that the brand is really owned by your customers, not your MarCom brand police team. Today, we’re seeing this actually play out in a very interesting twist.

The Data Portability Workgroup launches
The Data Portability group is a workgroup focused on building industry-wide standards for information to safely and freely pass from one site to another –all at the control of an individual user. Yes, I know we’re all sick of seeing yet another working group with little or no results, but this group appears to be making progress, I’m reviewing their status reports, and will probably be briefed by Chris at major milestones.

Logo infringement a cause for redesign
Recently, they launched and announced themselves, including the easy to remember figure 8/infinity sign. Apparently, this was too similar to the logo of Fedora, While copyright infringement is never a fun thing, what’s interesting is that the DataPortability group is crowd sourcing their logo design to the community.

The community designs, votes, and is rewarded
There are hundreds of dollar worth of prizes, ad exposure on Techcrunch and CenterNetworks, and iPhone and other goodies, read the full guidelines on Chris’s site.

The logos will be submitted on spec to the team and a ‘representative election’ will occur:

“The co-founders of the DataPortability project, along with the steering group, will make a short list. We will then provide a web-based voting system for the community to make the final choice.”

Letting go to gain more
This is really an interesting way to let the community create, decide, and take ownership over your own brand and logo. Let’s see how this turns up. To add to the reward, I’ll point to the winning designer, granting even additional exposure. Great job Chris and team, turning a potential lawsuit into a community involving event, I look forward to seeing the results.

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Although scary for product teams, feedback is great, I do my best to welcome it.

Last week, I announced my Forrester report entitled Online Community Best Practices from my blog If you’re a client you can access the report on the site, or you can purchase the report from the site, if you’re not satisfied, Forrester has a money back guarantee. This product, designed to help our clients make a logical and methodical way to benefit from community took me months to compose.

There was quite a bit of discussion: ComputerWorld covered it, over 17 blog posts discussing it, including those that agree –and disagree — with the report.

I often preach how product teams should be open and transparent as possible with their development and support process (and welcome feedback), and as an analyst, reports are one of my products. I welcome all points of view, and think that it adds to the overall value, here’s a few interesting takes on the report:

Here’s what the community said about my report:

Not everyone agreed. The loudest criticism comes from Nick O’Neill, one of the thought and practice leaders in the social networking space. He suggests that the graphic isn’t realistic (compared to crossing the chasm), and many, many other commenters bring up other curves, charts, and concepts. Education for me, and anyone else in the space.

A starting point for additional resources. Nancy White gives a very thorough review of the report, highlighting what she thought was great about the report, and what could have been improved. Believe me, if I could have included the many topics she suggested, I would have, but then we would have been approaching a book, not a short and sweet succint report.

Spikes, not curves. Karen O’Brian of Crimson Consulting does a great job re-analyzing the graphic, and suggested that a real world community will grow with ’spikes’ of activity rather than a smooth gradual flow, she’s right, and I suggest if the line was smoothed out, it would closely resemble –therefore, we both agree.

A detailed process. Jacob Morgan suggests two additional phases in the community lifecycle graphic, Brainstorming and Customer communication and feedback, both which are absolutely critical elements that I would consider to be part of other phases, good commentary.

Not every community will be successful. Nick Gonzales, former Techcrunch writer now with Social Media created this humorous ‘mash-up’ showing the demise of communities, pretty entertaining.

Ratings and comments. For Forrester clients, when you login to the site you’ll see an extranet view. This let’s customers leave comments and rank the report. I stand by my product, I read every comment, and will respond to any questions that clients may have, so far, the report has scored 9/10 but that’s only two votes and two comments from clients.

During the research process, one of the key findings I learned was the importance of roles. To be successful, corporate community initiatives requires an executive sponsor, a social media or community strategist that will fight the internal battles, and a community manager that will be an active member of the community.

This was an enlightening process, but even after the research is completed, there’s still a lot to learn.

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Left: One of the 5 diagrams from the report: Successful online communities experience the following stages.

I spent a few months researching and preparing for this two-piece report series. I’m proud of my deliverable on Online Community Best Practices. Like a term paper, this report is based off research, interviews, insight, and data. I interviewed over 17 people (many community leaders that you know) to find out the commonalities between successful communities.

Many of you are new to analyst reports, (myself included) the document is written in a very succint, actionable, and clear way, and every line is defensible , as it’s based off findings. This blog, while sometimes has elements of a report, has more opinion and topics based off my sole experience rather than the research of industry leaders.

Here’s the executive summary of the Online Community Best Practices

Online Community Best Practices
Communities Are A Powerful Tool, As Long As You Put Members’ Needs First

“An online community is an interactive group of people joined together by a common interest. It’s also one of the most powerful tools a marketer can deploy for customer retention, word of mouth, and customer insight. To host a successful community, think of it as you would product development: Start by focusing on objectives, chart a road map, assemble the right team, and plan to be flexible. Then build your success by launching the community with the backing of your most enthusiastic customers and staying engaged as the community grows. Above all, remember that control is in the hands of the members, so put their needs first, build trust, and become an active part of the community.”

While the report is only available for Forrester clients (like your company has products, this is ours) I can share with you some findings that seem to be a problem for everyone. First of all, many companies have a hard time being successful with their community if they want to control it too tight. The most successful companies let go of the control and acted more like a host, rather than a policeman. Secondly, many companies had a hard time kick-starting a community, just because you build it, doesn’t mean they’ll come.

If you’re a Forrester client, you can access the full report at the Forrester site. Please leave a comment on the site with your feedback, or on this blog. Essentially, I’m like a product manager, and I hold my customer opinions very closely, if you’ve further questions, I’d be happy to talk further.

Here are some of the companies that I interviewed, ACDSee, AirTran Airways, Ant’s Eye View (Jake McKee), Avenue A | Razorfish, Carnival Cruise Lines, Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation, Cnet TechRepublic, Constant Contact, Dogster, Intuit, Leverage Software, Microsoft, MySpace.com, Organic, Reuters AdvicePoint, SATMetrics, Telligent Systems, and you’ll even note that I credited Shel Israel for his definition of communities, I spearheaded this conversation on this blog, and in twitter. Each of these folks that were interviewed will receive a copy, stay tuned for an email.

Update: The report spread fast, really fast. Just a few hours after this post, one of the top German luxury car manufactures has requested a meeting today, to talk about online communities.

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I learn a lot from you, thanks for commenting.

I want to take the time to thank you for commenting. In my opinion, a successful blog is a dialog between more than two people. To date, there are 1,697 posts and 12,159 comments, so a conversation rate (comments divided by posts) of just over 7. Sure, not as impressive as some other sites, but it’s the quality of comments that matter.

This actually came up in discussion yesterday on a client call, where he pointed out that the comments you’ve left were insightful and thoughtful, I readily agreed. Sure, other blogs may have quantity lightweight comments, but here, they are often filled with details, opinions, and insight.

We’ve done research on technographics (how people use social computing tools) and for North American adults, the inactives far often outweigh those who leave comments. I read every single comment that comes through, and I end up learning a lot (not everyone agrees), in some cases, I’ll sometimes update the post and add links or point to your insight. In some cases, like yesterday, I get corrected for my mistakes, and that’s ok too. I certainly appreciate you adding links that add to the conversation, keep on doing that when there’s something to see.

In the near future, I plan to run that survey to find out more about the readers and commenters here, stay tuned for that.

So again, thanks for adding to the conversation.

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As an analyst, I watch the online community space very closely, and am always interested in seeing how traditional institutions and organizations approach, adapt, succeed or fail in adopting social tools.

Fast Company, a forward thinking business publication has revamped it’s corporate website to now be an online community. Their initial three page announcement written by Edward Sussman: “The Media is Social”

[Fast Company, a traditional publication, has featured community as it’s primary focus. But success isn’t guaranteed as: innovating without a clear objective is dangerous, the bottom-up approach must cascade to the whole organization, and they must rapidly make course corrections]

Opportunity
Fast Company is the first, but certainly not last, mainstream publication to integrate the majority of their site as a social community. The starting page of their website isn’t the magazine, or it’s articles, but is the community site. Traditional media is under fire from social media, the power has shifted to the participants, so in return Fast Company is participating: hiring bloggers and video bloggers (Robert Scoble and Shel Israel) and are integrating within their site. In many other cases, websites have bolted on social forums around content, this is clearly a full replacement of community over Fast Company content.

Objectives
Fast Company is attempting to involve readers and the market to be involved in creating content. We’ve listed out there are five major social computing objectives, (listening, talking, energizing, supporting, embracing) and this one could fall under embracing, where customers and employees collaborate to build next generation products and services.

Challenges
Once the initial buzz wears off, we’ll have to see who will remain leading the and joining in the conversations. Will the lines between professional created editorial and community continue to be blurred? How will high quality content be elevated so usefulness is found? Most importantly, with the many reports showing that advertising on social networks is ineffective, how will Fast Company monetize?

What they deployed
Fast Company deployed a community platform using Drupal, and hired experts to implement, it contains a variety of features from profile building, forums, user created blogs, media rooms, event calendars, and many other features. They have made this the primary experience from the homepage of Fast Company, and have a control navigation bar at the top of each page.

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Initial Analysis of the Community, Fast Company should:

Determine a Goal
Being creative for the sake of innovation isn’t enough. It’s great to see that they are trying something new, but what is the end goal? How will they measure results? Does the team know what success looks like?

Quickly Squash Bugs
I noticed a few hiccups that aren’t uncommon on a launch. 1) Site error: the site was not available for some time, Chris Brogan has screenshots 2) I tried to message Edward, but it got stuck in an endless loop of clicks to add him as a contact before messaging him, confusing. While all excusable the first week, this needs to quickly be resolved.

Focus on fewer features
The community site launched with too many features, as a result, the initial interface is overwhelming. I encourage clients to launch with only three major features, (such as a profile, forum, blog, media, q&a, etc), unfortunately, Fast Company launched without all of those

Elevate Fast Company Editorial
The professionally created content that we seek from Fast Company is hidden, which is too bad, as that’s why we come to them in the first place. There’s currently a saturation of online communities on every given subject on Ning, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo and Google groups. How is this different? I think the order is backwards: Lead with the editorial, attach the social features second, the social features should orbit (in context) the articles.

Clean up the Interface
The interface is crowded and unclear, resembling enterprise software, there are too many options and tools. I’m not the only one, I received feedback from some of my 3000 followers in twitter: “@jowyang I agree, the site was bewildering at first” The deployment looks like the features were determined by the developers and not a user experience designer. Let tools be hidden, and show more on a mouse over or let them cascade out. It’s confusing to understand what the top categories are compared to the control bar, then the many features on every page. Think Zen: articles first, social second, features and tools third.

Start with a tour
Develop a quick and dirty walk through video or animation that highlights how the website will serve the users, and how they can be involved and contribute. Highlight at the lead in video, and have your top bloggers post quickly.

Make community a core ethos of company
Being first has it’s advangtes, you get the buzz, but there’s also disadvantages: the path has not been cleared before, and innovators must quickly course correct when mistakes happen. Editors, writers, journalists, management and support must all be involved in the community, taking input, talking, and discussing. For success, Fast Company will need to involve a social way of thinking in everything they do, this can’t simply be a flash or wine thrown in the pan by management.

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The Big Picture:

Can a business publication blend journalism and online community to create something better than either by itself? This is the ‘fast’ question posed in the community, and there were a myriad of responses, most positive. My response was the following:

“Yes it can, and it can also learn more from it’s audience, fuel research, ideas, and stories. The successful business will learn how to get the community to be part of the content creation, and how to monetize on top of this.”

The Future
Expect this to be a success for Fast Company, but they’ll need to act on the previous recommendations. Expect other business publications to quickly launch similar communities, and soon the industry will be inundated with ‘me toos’. The savvy publications will still realize that the web is distributed and won’t limit their community efforts to their corporate domains, but will also spread to where the people are. The savvy fishermen, fish where the fish are.

Conclusions: Being innovative doesn’t guarantee success
Fast Company has launched an innovative community site, unseen by most mainstream publications. When the shinyness wears off, the company will need to involve community in every aspect of it’s strategy for it to thrive. This is certainly a website and community to watch, I’ll post additional analysis in a few months, and hope to get some numbers from the team.

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[Above: I peered over the balcony to take a shot of the main hall]

I attended the Customer Service is the new Marketing Summit in San Francisco, really a tremendous view, weather, and vibe at the Presidio a converted military base with a great view. (Both my Grandfathers were officers and used to attend events there).

Think about that concept for a second, the new marketing is actually the customer experience. Absolutely, and with social media, friends will tell friends about their experience with a company, thus impacting how traditional marketing used to flow –now it will be direct from customer to prospect.

They handed this company customer pact document to all attendees, please take a look, I think it’s fantastic, and I’ll hold myself to making sure people I talk to in the industry upload this, and that I also follow these rules.

I was asked to give two sessions on Online Community Best Practices (my coverage area as an analyst) and we had a great sessions on contributors at each of the two meetings.

Although I’ll keep the specifics anonymous, we had startups, small companies, large companies from many different walks of life.

I structured the workshop where we’d identify key problems, then would get folks to share their different best practices, and I’d be sure to add my own. I promised to share all the content and here it is:

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Findings from the Online Community Best Practices Workshop
Here’s what the attendees at my workshop said were important to them

The Many Objectives of Communities

Insight from customers, give them a voice

Better experience

A social experience, where common folks get to hang out

Get users to know that they are a human company, and support

Building communities around products, and to learn from customers

New users don’t know how to start. Or are unclear of what to do

50 million customers, get them to self support

For a low engagement product, how do you get them to be sticky so they are top of line next time it’s time to buy

Bringing service innovation to a higher level, getting constituents to collaborate

Issues: Raising awareness to get customers to use community, the value is low

Improve customer support issues

Collaborate and get customers to internal

The Many Benefits of having a community

Decreased Cost of Support

Increased Revenue

SEO

Improved Loyalty

Transparency: less time spent on marketing programs as they use

Consumer Trust and improve

The many costs of communities

Moderation costs

Negative discussions, or not dealing with them, lack of control

Difficulty monetizing social networks

Cost to take action on what customers ask for, closing the loops costs money

Development costs

Surveys and samples

Measurements

Different ways with Dealing with Detractors

Varies in every situation

1 to Many communications

They have a process is in place

Make them feel heard

Compensate them (depending on severity)

Creating a direct feedback place, rather than having in community forums

Good practice: Develop process for the different types of detractors

One company categorized members to put them into different buckets

Having a good tone, being consistent with all members

General Best Practices
In this final topic, I asked all attendees to participate and share what works for them

Trust is the foundation of every community

Great relationships with members that want to share

Make sure every question that is asked gets an appropriate answer

Create a year long plan, so it’s effective across the business, thinking strategic

Create valuable content

Recognize valuable contributors

Have knowledgeable moderators

Incorporate it into your products

Being Human: Make sure that people know that the community manager is a real person

Acknowledge people

Loyalty programs

Focus on experience

Quality Content

Ask permission: Ask the members if we can reach out and talk to them first

Start threads with questions to get the conversations going

Help users connect with other users, identify ‘super users’

You can never give too much information

Encouraging feedback from the community

Always have a direct email so it can encourage rapid response

Rewarding and recognizing members that have done good work

Embrace what the community is actually doing

Acknowledge when people are right –even if they are hostile

Bubbling up information, turning things into FAQs

Internal encouragement for employees (points)

Every question that someone else can answer, have it answered by the right person

Track Google Alerts, if someone tracks outside the community pull them in.

Be transparent, let the community monitor and police itself (rather than the company taking too much control)

Reward and thank users that participate

Plan and integrate internal knowledge bases

At Forrester, I’m publishing a handful of reports on this topic, they will be available to clients, or you can purchase them on the site, they are very, very succint and tell you what to do do have a successful community.

Didn’t attend the event? Andy took notes Ideas from Customer Service is the New Marketing #3, Christine has captured why Zappos Shares Secrets of 75% Repeat Business Ross Mayfield shares his insight Geek Squad on Marketing is a Tax You Pay for Being Unremarkable, and a few others according to Technorati.

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I’m both passionate about communities (having created the community advocate group in Facebook, as well as held the community manager role at HDS) and am now doing research on this topic. I’m on a quest to find an accurate, reliable, and timeless definition of the term “online community”.

I vetted this definition with my Twitter network, received nearly 50 responses this morning. I’ve boiled down a definition to the following:

An online community is: Where a group of people with similar goals or interests connect and exchange information using web tools.

Also good reads are other ways to define community, (quoting Jake McKee). Amy Jo Kim has a book and online resources that are very helpful.

Your feedback wanted (as always) how do you define community? Please note this needs to be succint, yet comprehensive and stand the test of time.

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Update:
I embedded all the responses I received on twitter about the community definition. I think it’s appropriate to note that I’m working with the community to define the term.

I just saw Shel defined this from his blog as “Communities are bodies of people loosely joined together by a common interest”. That’s the most succint one so far, I’ll add to it to suit the requirement of an ‘online community’: “Communities are bodies of people loosely joined together by a common interest that exchange information using web tools”.

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Update 2: In the comments below, Jake suggests that time and relationships are a factor, I don’t think they are. People don’t have to have relationships to be part of a community (although he suggests that skirts into a community of practice arena) and I think someone can be part of a community, time not being a factor.

As a result, I’m getting fond of this second definition:

“Online communities are bodies of people joined together by a common interest”.

Working this definition out in public has proven fruitful, even some of my colleagues are chiming in.

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The day after. I’ve given this more thought, and in my quest to “boil down” the essence of the term, it’s clear to me that folks do NOT agree on the following being attributes of every community:

Relationships: From deep to none
Time (long time to develop vs short time)
Interaction: from exchanging ideas to just observing.
Agreement of all ideas

The two attributes that everyone seems to agree are always part of a community are the follwoing

A group of people
Commonalities, affinities

So the second definition listed above, really has the potential for staying power.

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Update Jan 31st: Jake brings up more points, that an online community is too broad, there’s got to be a more definitive attribute to describe a ‘bunch of people standing around’ vs a ‘community. Could it be interaction, duration, or the building of relationships?

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Ellen Lee did a great wrap-up article over at SFGate on Facebook in 2007, she called me up for my opinion on the company over the last year. I suggested that Facebook is very innovative (the first to lead an application platform, and to do social based ads) yet remains very arrogant. (twice not including customers to make decisions over their very own privacy of the newspage and beacon).

Having betrayed the trust of it’s users twice, a third time is going to result in mutiny, and users will start leaving, it wont be hard for some users to organize and move.

What could Facebook do better? Involve it’s customers members (Update: See Doc Searls comment) in testing and decision making. I would advise them to bring customers members closer and involve them in the testing and decision making process. Create a small private group of members that really understand the program and involve them in the decision maker process. This group would be empowered to talk to the product team, test out new features, and provide honest and thoughtful research. You can reward them with insider knowledge (they won’t need to be paid) and many of them will become advocates and help promote (and sometimes defend) the feature releases and the brand in general.

To Facebook’s defense, I’ll bet they didn’t know the full ramifications of their innovative actions (or didn’t think it all the way through), and as a result, were learning about it from reading blogs.

With Facebook being a community or “social utility” it will be nice to see them living some of these values we hold dear before they release their next feature.

Get closer to members, and be more successful, a social network is only as good as the collective of it’s members.

Please chime in with your suggestions for Facebook.

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