Four Community Ideals

I was asked to participate in an interesting collaborative project called the Project 100 which was started by consumer marketer  Jeff Caswell last month.

As Jeff noted on the Project 100 blog:

It’s a simple concept.  100 authors.  400 words each.  1 Collaborative Book on “Project 100: Marketing in the Social Media Era”.  I will publish the book using Blurb.com and all proceeds will go to support Susan G. Komen for the Cure.  I am not doing this for the money. I am doing it because I think its cool, I am interested in what marketing leaders are thinking and I believe in Susan G. Komen.

I agree with all of those thoughts and the tough part for me was coming up with just 400 words.  I’m sending my submission off to Jeff tonight and thought I would share my thoughts in this blog post too.

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Four Community Ideals

Marketing in the social media era represents a dramatic change from marketing in the ‘old-style’ push era.  One of the more visible ways that a company can participate in social media today is to build a community around their products and services.  The key functions of a community are to share up-to-date information with customers and prospects, to have interactive conversations with customers, and for customers to interact with and provide support to other customers.

Here are my four simple ideals for communities:

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  Apollo del Belvedere Holding Tom’s 4 Ideals for Community

  Be transparent – It is critical to be totally transparent with your community efforts.  This means that all communication needs to be both open and honest in order to build the inherent trust that is necessary for people to begin sharing with you.

• Be personal – Communities must make the communications personal.  What this means is that the company and social media managers generally need to lead the way and share first by posting personal profiles and contact information.
• Be compelling – The community experience must be compelling enough for people to want to come back.  So, it is important to focus on both the big and little things to ensure that people have a pleasant and valuable experience. The usability of the site, content and discussions must be interesting enough for people to visit more than once – and to have them recommend the experience to their network.  Maintaining frequent communications with your members is also critical.
• Be omnipresent –The community must be wherever your users want it to be.  While you may have community elements on your website, you also need to provide ways for users to interact and get the latest community news and updates.  This goes way beyond having RSS feeds for the key content on your site.  For example, your community needs ways to duplicate the community experience in the leading social media sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.  By making it easier for community to participate, you will make the community stickier in the long run.

Once you master the ideals, the community work is only starting.  Communities must be actively promoted, managed and supported in order to be successful.   There is no such thing as “build it and they will come” in the social media world.  Building and sustaining a community will require a great deal of heavy lifting and dedication, but the end results will be worth it.

The Importance of Regular Community Communication

One of the most important tasks that a community manager needs to do is to regularly communicate with his members. When I was managing the Catalyze community, I accomplished this by sending out an email newsletter every 2 to 3 weeks.  The frequent contact is important from many different angles.  It keeps the community in the front of each member’s mind and reminds them that there is value in the community.  Your members are generally busy with other tasks and its easy to forget to regularly check the community site.  Regular communication also drives members back to the community as shown in the graphic below taken from Google Analytics which depicts daily visits to Catalyze from January to July 2008.

Community Visits - January to July 2008

You can definitely see from the spikes in visits (highlighted by the red arrows) when I sent out my bi-weekly community newsletter.  The number of visits on the days when I sent out my newsletter were 2 to 3 times higher than the normal daily average.  I was also getting fairly decent open and click-thru rates, averaging 30 to 40% open rates and 30-50% click-thru rates.

I used Constant Contact as my email vendor.  I found it very easy to use and the price was reasonable.  For example, the tiered pricing runs from $15 per month for 0-500 email addresses to $50 per month for 2501 to 5000 addresses.  I found it pretty simple to create my email newsletters in Constant Contact and would definitely recommend it to others.  (Interestingly, I have been hearing a lot of commercials for Constant Contact on both NPR and during the MLB Playoff games.)  Constant Contact also has a survey module, but I never had a chance to use it.

Communicating regularly does take some time and effort.  I estimate that I spent from 4 to 6 hours per newsletter.  For me, the process started with downloading the latest list of names and emails from my community site and uploading them to my email vendor.  Then I had to compose and test the email newsletter.  In my case, the first time I set up my email template took some time to get the format and color scheme right.  After that, I was able to start with the previous newsletter and make modifications on the fly.

And here are some pretty good practices that I recommend:

• Communicate frequently – every 2 to 3 weeks is a good rule as you don’t want to inundate your community members with too many emails.
• Include links to the latest content – I would generally try to highlight an upcoming webcast along with the 5 or 6 links each from the latest blog posts, library content and forum discussions in every newsletter.  I also had a ongoing link to sign up for the LinkedIn and Facebook groups.
• Check and re-check the email – most email programs will let you preview the newsletter or send out a sample email.  I would definitely recommend that you are super-meticulous with your newsletter.  Since you are blasting out your message to a number of people, you do not want to appear sloppy or have any links that do not work.
• Re-post online link to newsletter – most email programs also let you create an web version of the newsletter.  I would use then post this link on Twitter (using the Catalyze Twitter account) and on LinkedIn and Facebook.  You never know where your members will find the link and you need to make it easy for them to find it in their favorite social media hang-out.
• Send email out on Tuesdays or Wednesday – I found that my email blasts were more successful if I scheduled them to go out first thing (8am Eastern) on a Tuesday or Wednesday morning.  Most email programs will let you prepare an email and then schedule it for later delivery.  This is a great feature if you are going to be traveling or on vacation, but still want to send out a regular communication.
• Review your stats – Your email program should have an analytics package.  Make sure to regularly review your bounced, open and click-thru stats to make sure your message is getting through and that it is resonating with your community.

I’d love to hear experiences from other community managers on their experiences with email newsletters.

Gartner Blames IT Managers for Failed Communities?

In a recent press release from Gartner, the headline states that “many social software projects fail due to IT managers not having a well-defined purpose to succeed”.

Now that’s seems a little harsh to the IT world. Unless Gartner is just trying to be controversial or come up with an angle that will attract attention to their upcoming conference, IT managers are being unfairly blamed.

I would place the blame for failed social software projects squarely on the shoulders of the business unit managers and senior executives responsible for overall corporate strategy.  These executives are the ones who ultimately control the destiny of social media ‘experiments’ and it is critical that they understand and embrace social media or it will not be successful.  While the IT guys are just following orders, they do need to have confidence to raise the red flags when they see any IT projects that are not properly supported or have strategies that are not clear.

Anthony Bradley, managing vp at Gartner goes on to say in the release that:

Contrary to the common perception that vibrant communities arise spontaneously, starting with a carefully chosen purpose does not limit participants. It gives them the direction they need to form a productive community.

I do agree with Gartner’s assertion that users need a “well-defined purpose of appropriate scope” to mobilize around for any community effort (although their verbiage and word choice is a little stilted).

Gartner also defined seven characteristics of a “good purpose” which seems to me like a poorly organized list of descriptives and phrases:

1. Magnetic
2. Aligned
3. Low risk
4. Properly scoped
5. Facilitates evolution
6. Measurable
7. Community-driven

In any case, Gartner fails to mention the most obvious reason for social software failures.  In my mind, strong community strategy and management is key to any successful community.  In fact, I wrote a blog post on this topic recently (“Community Managers and Quarterbacks“).  In short:

• good (and passionate, committed) community managers –> thriving community
• bad or non-existent community managers –> stagnant or dying community.

Of course, we may need to take Gartner’s social media advice with a grain of salt.  I don’t know much about Anthony Bradley and couldn’t locate much about him in a Google or Twitter search.  Personally, I don’t trust anyone in social media who doesn’t twitter and who has been actively blogging for less than a year.

Does anyone have any additional comments?

First Impressions of NPR’s New Community

I have been listening to National Public Radio (NPR) since 1982, so I was pleased to see that they rolled out a new community for its members, listeners and fans this week.

According to the Inside NPR blog, the community is “is a real thing; it is made up of the people who work here, the people who work at member stations, the people who listen to NPR on the radio, the people who use NPR.org and the people who support NPR”.

The blog post further describes their effort:

Starting now, it will be easier for you to talk to us, for us to talk to you and for you all to talk to each other. We are making it possible for anyone who registers with us to comment on a story and to create a profile page where many interesting things can happen. We are providing a forum for infinite conversations on NPR.org. Our hopes are high. We hope the conversations will be smart and generous of spirit. We hope the adventure is exciting, fun, helpful and informative. This is important for the NPR community.

Because I am a longtime NPR fan and listener, I decided to join the community and set up a profile today.  I even had an email exchange with Andy Carvin (the social media guy at NPR) who helped me solve my issue with putting links in my profile.

NPR Community Homepage

The community homepage shows the most popular stories in the left column organized by the “Most commented stories”, Most recommended stories” and “Most emailed stories”.

The center column has the “Welcome to the NPR Community” and “Editor’s Picks for Comments on NPR.org”.  The Discussion Rules are very clear and well-written, and the FAQs are complete.

The right column includes your member profile (my profile is here), an unobtrusive NPR ad, a list of active users and recently active staff.  I’m not sure how the active users are selected because the ones I clicked on had not commented yet (so how could they be active users?).

Here is what I like so far:

• Overall appeal – My overall sense of the community site is that it has a clean, simple and pleasing-to-the-eye interface.  Being a non-profit, they do not have to clutter their site with ads, teasers and “flash” (like the CNN website).
• Popular stories – I like how the community helps decide the popular stories.  If you trust the community, this is a great place to stop for the top stories without searching through the entire NPR site.
• Profile – I like how you can create your member profile, but it would be easier with a WYSIWYG editor.  Profiles with pictures really ‘personalize’ virtual communities and make people feel more at home.
• Recent Activity – I like how my recent comments show up immediately in my profile.  I commented on an article just to make sure it happened.
• Andy Carvin (the NPR Social Media Guy) – Andy must have been cloned because I saw so many of his comments today.  It’s great to see the community leaders interact with the community, and he makes it easy to follow him on Twitter, read his blog or friend him on Facebook.  The transparency is much appreciated.

Here are a couple of minor issues from my brief review:

• Clicking on Links –  Clicking on a link launches the link in the same window, so I have to keep hitting te back button if I want to get back to the community homepage.  I would have set a default that all links open in new windows or tabs – or an easier way to get back to the community page.  I can click on my profile name to get back to the community, but it’s not really obvious.  How about a bigger COMMUNITY button on all NPR website pages in the top nav?
• Searching Members – There is no easy way to search for other members. If you put a tag in your profile (like Social Media or Car Talk), you can then find others who have self-identified with those topics by clicking on that tag.  For example, 70 people have selected Car Talk as one of their favorite programs and 16 people have listed social media as an area of expertise.
• Sharing and Recommending Stories – It does not look like my shared and recommended stories appear in my Recent Activity – just the comments appear.  It would be nice if these items would show up in my Activity feed.

Overall, I am pretty impressed with this first community effort from NPR.  I like how they are listening to their members and how they admitted that they were “late to this game, to be blunt.” They are more than making up for it with this “turn at the bat.”  Good show Andy and team!

If you are a fan or listener of NPR, I recommend checking out the site and adding it to your bookmarks.

Looking for An Example Community RFP?

Is your company starting to consider a community initiative?

Are you wondering where to start?

Have you been looking for an example community RFP?

Look no further.

In the spirit of social media transparency, I have attached an example of an actual Community RFP that I used 2 years when I started the community process to develop what eventually became the Catalyze community.  One of the vendors who responded to our proposal noted that it was one of the most complete and comprehensive proposals that they had seen.

I made a couple of slight updates to the the RFP, but for the most part I would use this same RFP if I were looking for a vendor today.  Feel free to use the example as a template or to give you some ideas for your own request for proposal.  I have left blanks where there was proprietary information, but for the most part the template is generic.

There are two key sections in the RFP template:

1. General information

• Purpose of the RFP
• RFP communications
• RFP timeline
• RFP preparation
• Vendor responses
• Effective dates of pricing
• Evaluation criteria
• Right to reject RFP responses
  

2. Requirements

• Community strategy
• Infrastructure requirements
• Functionality requirements
• Ongoing management requirements
• Technology requirements
• Other requirements
• Cost requirements

Click on the picture below from where I’ve posted the RFP on Scribd.com or on this link to access the RFP example.  On Scribd, you can view the document or download it in Word, PDF or text format – or share or send it to others.

Let me know if you find the RFP helpful or if you have any additions or comments.

Everything in Moderation

In the B2B community that I used to manage, there was not much need for officially moderating member comments as our overall traffic was manageable without significant oversight.  When I heard about the Mzinga-sponsored webconference on moderation featuring Scott Monty (who ‘drives’ Social Media at Ford Motor) and Mike Pascucci (Director and ‘King’ of Moderation Services at Mzinga), I thought it would be a great opportunity to learn more about the best practices around community moderation.

Here’s what I learned.

Mike and Scott had slight differences in opinion on moderation vs. management.  Mike refers to the processes as moderation as a reactive activity and community management as a proactive step, while Scott somewhat jokingly referred to moderation as ‘censorship’.

One of my favorite slides showed the life cycle stages of a successful community – and the take-away is that both management and moderation play a critical role in starting, growing and maintaining a community.  The slide also provides a representation of how a community grows from launch to maturity.

Mzinga - The Importance of Community Management and Moderation

Mike discussed the pros and cons between pre-moderation and post-moderation services.  Pre-moderation refers to reviewing all submitted content before it goes live vs. post-moderation review of content after it has been posted.  One benefit of post-moderation is that it provides a better user experience – but that benefit comes with the risk that offensive or out-of-policy content may appear on the site before it is self-policed by the community or acted upon by the community managers.  It ultimately comes down to several factors:  what you’re trying to accomplish in the community, regulations and laws that may impact what is being said, and management comfort with natural conversations about your product and brand.  Then, it is a matter of coming up with a tailored plan to address moderation and management issues which is usually results in a hybrid pre- and post-moderation plan.

In any case, moderation is a key part of any community manager’s job description.  While I rarely had to moderate a comment, I was reviewing all postings on a daily basis.

The case study portion of the webinar was also interesting.  First, Scott shared his experiences with creating the SyncMyRide community at Ford to facilitate peer-to-peer support where all submitted posts were pre-moderated to comply with strict automotive regulations.  Mike also discussed moderation experiences at RateMyProfessors.com, Liberty Mutual and CBS:Kid Nation.

During the Q&A session, someone asked about the optimal number of moderators to community members.  Mike answered that the important value to track is the volume of posting activity and drive the moderators based on that activity.  As a rule of thumb, Mike said that the number of posts that violate community rules or require moderation is generally 1% to 3% of the total activity volume.

The slides and presentation recording will be available from the Mzinga Webinars and Event Archive in the next day or two, and the ‘live’ Twitter feed is available here.

Confused About Community Registration?

Confused About Community Registration?

Communities walk a fine line when they are trying to get people to register for their site.  On one hand, community managers and sponsors want to know as much as possible about each member as possible.  On the other hand, most people are reluctant to part with their data or do not have the patience to complete a long registration form or submit to an arduous process.

The bottom line is that you don’t want your registration process to stop people from joining your community or start out their community experience on the wrong foot.

Some of the easiest registrations include just an email address and password.  While that is simple for the enduser, it does not provide much in the way of member demographics.

In the community I used to manage, we started out with a very onerous registration process.  Prospective members had to complete 15 required fields and after pressing the enter button, we would send them a confirmation email with a registration code.  Many members never received their registration code and others were stymied by the process which limited our conversion numbers.

In the end, we knew that we had to change the process and eliminated the confirmation code part of the process.  We also streamlined the required fields to the following:

• First name
• Last name
• Email address
• Company name
• User name
• Password
• Country

Additionally, we had a section of the registration page that was clearly labeled as optional.  The registration fields in this section included: company industry, address, phone number, job title, years of experience, role, topics of interest, and professional memberships.  About 50% of new members filled out some or all of the optional fields.

We also explained why we were collecting the information in the optional fields which probably helped with our conversion rates:

We would like you to complete some or all of these fields when you register, but they are optional. These fields help us to better understand our members and serve you better. You can also re-visit your profile and update or review your profile at a later date (using the View/Edit Profile link in the top right corner).

Finally, here are some simple tips for community registration:

1. Keep your community registration “simple and easy”
2. Look at the process for many different communities and incorporate the best ideas into your process
3. Examine and re-examine your registration process from a new member standpoint
4. Use drop-down boxes or check boxes to simplify and standardize input wherever possible

What data do you collect during registration for your community?  Are you happy with your process?

Getting the Most Out of Community Metrics

I was the community manager of the Catalyze Community – a B2B niche community for business analysts and usability professionals – from its inception in early 2007 and oversaw its growth to over 4,000 members in July 2008.  During the 18 months under my leadership, tracking and analyzing metrics was an important part of my job.

I tracked a number of metrics on a weekly basis.  Half of the stats came from Google Analytics and the other half were derived from a standard report from Mzinga, our community vendor.  Using Excel, I created a spreadsheet to track all of the stats on a weekly basis in one place.  It is critical to track these statistics on a weekly basis in order to have the necessary information to monitor the trends and health of your community.  Sometimes it felt like a pain to pull the numbers, but it really only took 15 minutes or so per week to pull the raw numbers and then some additional time to study what it all meant.

You should also keep in mind that the metrics you are tracking will change over time as a community evolves.  In our case, we were totally focused on member growth and pageviews in year 1 of the community and were starting to swing the importance to member engagement for year 2 of the community.

Here is a picture of the spreadsheet I used for the Catalyze stats:

Catalyze Community Metrics

From Mzinga, we tracked information on member growth, posts to blogs, forums and resources and resource downloads and views.  From Google Analytics, we tracked traditional website stats such as visits, pageviews, bounces, number of pages visited and average time on site.

I cannot say enough about Google Analytics.  First, its free.  Second, it allows you easily select the time period to analyze and the quality and ease of use for the interface is rare for Google.  Third, did I mention that Google Analytics is free?

I also calculated a couple of additional metrics from the existing statistics.  The most interesting one for us was “Visits as a % of Total Members”.  I used this as a proxy for what percentage of our membership was visiting the community on a weekly basis.  Our average % was 40%, but it ranged from 25% to 50%.  The weekly variance was definitely impacted by the frequency of the bi-weekly email updates and by the quality of our content.

On a quarterly basis, I also took a complete download of our member data and created a series of cross-tab reports to analyze additional information about our member base.  The data for this analysis was collected during our registration process, but most of it was clearly labeled as optional.  Still, more than 75% of our members voluntarily provided us with their data.  Using this data we were able to identify frequency of visits, geographic origin, size of company, interests, and membership in other groups.  Using this information, I was able to create a special email update for members who had not re-visited our site since they registered.

Based on my experience with the Catalyze Community, I would recommend that you:

1. track key statistics on a weekly basis
2. turn on Google Analytics for your community site
3. never get too complacent with what you’re tracking

Of course, I was never satisfied with what we were doing with our community metrics and constantly pushed our vendor to make it easier to get to additional data.  I will devote a future blog post to discuss my Community Metrics Wish List.

Adding A LinkedIn Group To Your Community

If you are managing a community, especially a B2B or professional community, you need to make your community friendly and available to LinkedIn members.  LinkedIn is becoming the de facto social networking site where people maintain their online ‘resume’ and having a LinkedIn Group is a community best practice.

Adding and maintaining a LinkedIn Group is pretty simple and low maintenance.  Plus, LinkedIn Groups are a great way to make your communities “stickier”.  If you can get someone to join the community and your LinkedIn Group, then it is highly likely that this is a member who really supports you community and will be around for the long haul.  Members can also use the group feature to connect with other LinkedIn members who are not in their network.  In that way, the group ‘badge’ acts as a pre-qualification for vouching for a contact.  Since the LinkedIn Group is listed in the Group Director, it is also a great way to drive additional traffic to the community website.

During the 18 months I managed the Catalyze community, about 1/3rd of our community members also joined the LinkedIn Group.  I don’t know if this is above or below average, but I was pleased with that level of commitment and popularity.

How to get started with LinkedIn Groups:

1. Go to LinkedIn Create a Group page
2. Upload a large (100×50 pixel) and small (60×30 pixel) logo — This is probably the hardest part of creating a group as you have to scale your community logo to these exact width specifications.  I use SnagIt to create JPGs which I would highly recommend if you are doing this on your own.
3. Fill out the group information
4. Wait for confirmation that your group is active

And here is how the LinkedIn Groups will appear in your profile:

LinkedIn Group Listing

When your group is activated (it takes a couple of days to get approved), you get a group URL that you can use to direct members to so they can add the group to their individual profile.

You should also include the link on the About page of your community.  I also included the link in my bi-weekly email updates.

I set up my LinkedIn Group to require me to manually approve all members which allowed me to make sure that LinkedIn members who were not affiliated with my community were included.  I found that there are a lot of recruitors and LinkdIn badge collectors who would try to hone in on our community group.  Checking and approving members took me about 5-10 minutes several times per week.

With LinkedIn Groups, a list of all members and their emails is also available for download to the person with adminstrator or manager rights.  You could use this list to supplement your community email marketing efforts or provide the LinkedIn members with special offers.

I am interested in your experiences with LinkedIn Groups.  Add a comment below about how LinkedIn Groups is working for you.

Crowdsourcing Mzinga’s Strategy On A Napkin

Rachel Happe who leads strategic consulting at community vendor Mzinga offered a challenge on Twitter last week to participate in producing a great strategy diagram.

Mzinga is crowdsourcing to get a great strategy diagram – everyone is submitting a ‘Back of the Napkin’ Drawing – http://tinyurl.com/3alxja 08:54 AM August 08, 2008

In Mzinga terms, crowdsourcing is a way to let the ‘crowds’ help you do something.  Companies are crowdsourcing many activities these days, from their marketing when they run commercial contests to their product development when they let customers define their products.

The link in Rachel’s tweet links to an article in Fast Company from last April by Kate Bonamici Flaim.  The article discussed a new book by Dan Roam called The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures. The idea behind the book is that anybody with a pen and a scrap of paper can use visual thinking to work through complex business ideas.  The book is broken down into steps which provides the reader with “tools and rules” to facilitate picture making.

Always up for a challenge and after being a Mzinga customer for almost 2 years, I figured that I should throw an entry into the ring.

I have a couple of caveats.  First, napkins are awfully hard to draw on, second, I am not an artist and third, I have not read Dan’s book yet.  So, I actually cheated a bit and drew my submission on a piece of 8 1/2 x 11 paper and also had help to draw some of my elements.  It’s not exactly what I visualized in my mind, but it’s close.  With that, it is a great exercise to summarize a strategy on a single page.

So, here is my entry for Rachel’s contest:

Mzinga Strategy on a Napkin by Tom Humbarger

So, can you draw your strategy on a napkin?