The Social Business Show Where Online Community Meets Business Performance

ProCommunity #15: How to Build, Manage, and Market Your Online Community

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 17:47:00 GMT

Discussing Why Online Communities Are a Tangible Business Asset with Michael Silverman

Michael Silverman joins us for this episode of ProCommunity, the show where online communities meet business performance.

Michael is a the CEO of Duo Consulting, an open-source strategy and technology firm. Along with being a seasoned entrepreneur and speaker, he is the author of the book, Capturing Community: How to Build, Manage and Market Your Online Community. Michael can be found at @MSilvermanDuo.

The Online Community Topics That We Chatted About:

Why is now a good time to focus on creating an online community for your business?
The different types of online communities
Examples and characteristics of social communities that deliver
The real business-level results to be achieved using online communities
Building your own community vs. using Facebook or LinkedIn
The components of a successful online customer community strategy
How to get executives to view owned online communities as a strategic asset
Setting expectations for creating a private online community
Steps an organization can take to get started creating an online community

ProCommunity #14: How to Use Offline Engagement Models to Engage Customers in Online Communities

Wed, 17 Oct 2012 14:14:00 GMT

Discussing Using Evidence-Based Social Design to Build Successful Online Communities with Paul Resnik

Paul Resnik joins us for this installment of ProCommunity, the show where online communities meet business performance.

Paul Resnik is a Professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information. Along with researching and teaching about online communities, Paul is the co-author of the new book, Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design. Paul can be found on the University of Michigan’s website.

The Online Community Topics That We Talked About:

The fundamental elements of a successful online community
The challenges to creating a thriving online community
Advice for companies planning to launch an online customer or user community
How to start and grow a new online community
Lessons from offline organizations for how to improve onboarding processes
The role of community managers in build commitment among new members
Techniques that community managers can use to deal with conflict
How to drive member contributions in an online community
Common mistakes organizations make when planning an online community
Setting up systems to create and maintain productive social relationships
The power and pitfalls of gamification in your online community

ProCommunity #13: The Psychology Behind Creating Customer Engagement in Online Communities

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 11:24:00 GMT

Discussing How to Design High Levels of Engagement in Your Online Community with Nir Eyal

Nir Eyal joins us for this installment of ProCommunity, the show where online communities meet business performance.

Nir is an entrepreneur, investor, and leading thinker on how to create high engagement products. Along being a Lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a frequent speaker at industry conferences and Fortune 500 companies, Nir also writes for TechCrunch, Forbes, and Psychology Today. Nir blogs about business, engagement, and human behavior at NirAndFar.com, where you can sign up to get his upcoming book entitled Hooked: How to Drive Engagement By Creating User Habits.

The Mobile and Online Engagement Topics That We Chatted About:

Why business people should care about creating high-engagement products and communities
The hazards and morality of addicting technology
Focusing on technology vs. human behavior
The physiological elements of engagement and addictive habits
Why are Pinterest, Facebook, and checking email on your phone so addictive?
Designing habits during your organization’s product planning process
Examples of habit forming behavior in mobile apps or social communities
Why are marketing, design, and product management all important to designing engagement?
The biggest challenges to creating addicting communities
The unlikely importance of variable rewards
The differences between creating habit-forming behaviors in existing products vs. new products
How to help customers become invested in your community

ProCommunity #12: How to Bring Together Online Communities & CRM To Improve Business Performance – Part 2 of 2

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 12:20:00 GMT

Discussing How to Put Social CRM to Work for Your Business with Barton Goldenberg

This is the second half of our discussion with Barton Goldenberg on online communities and social CRM. Watch the first part of our conversation on the previous episode of ProCommunity, the show where online communities meet business performance.

Barton is the founder and president of ISM, a pioneering firm in CRM and social community strategy. Along with providing strategic services to top organizations across the globe, Barton is a well-known speaker, futurist, and author on customer relationship management, social CRM and online customer communities.

His books include CRM In Real Time: Empowering Customer Relationships, CRM Automation, and Social CRM (out in late 2012). Barton can be found at @BGoldenbergISM and www.CRMSocialMediaSpeaker.com.

The Online Customer Community Topics That We Chatted About:

How private customer communities make social CRM a reality for b2b companies
Ways b2b businesses use online communities to impact business performance
The similarities between b2c and b2b communities
Why public and private online communities need to work together
Do executive understand how to capitalize on customer community?
Online community software and the future of customer management
Why online support communities are so popular?
Opportunities presented by online communities in marketing and sales
The future of online communities in eCommerce
Advice for taking customer communities from idea to results
The risks of not embracing online communities in your business

ProCommunity #12: The Real Strategies & Profit Behind Social CRM – Part 1 of 2

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 11:45:00 GMT

Discussing the Use of Private Online Communities in Social CRM with Barton Goldenberg

Barton Goldenberg joins us for this installment of ProCommunity, the show where online communities meet business performance. This is the first part of our two-part discussion.

Barton is the founder and president of ISM, a pioneer in customer relationship management and social CRM strategy. Along with providing strategic services to best-in-class organizations across the globe, Barton is a well-known speaker, futurist, and author on CRM, social CRM and social media communities. His books include CRM In Real Time: Empowering Customer Relationships, CRM Automation, and Social CRM (out in late 2012). Barton can be found at @BGoldenbergISM and www.CRMSocialMediaSpeaker.com.

The Social CRM Topics That We Chatted About:

The evolution social CRM
Bringing together transactional information with emotional or sentimental data
Extending CRM data to include social activity
The state of the social CRM landscape
Taking social community engagement from idea to profitable business strategy
Social CRM metrics
How AAA is using private online community software to enhance their customer relationship strategy
The importance of private online communities in social CRM
How public social networks and private social communities work together

Don't miss part two of this discussion. Subscribe to Socious' ProCommunity show by email, via RSS, or in iTunes.

ProCommunity #11: Finding a Smart Way to Approach Social Business

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 12:05:00 GMT

Discussing Strategies Behind Successful Social Businesses with Jeff Marmins

Jeff Marmins joins us for this installment of ProCommunity, the show where online communities meet business performance.

Jeff is the CEO of social business consulting firm, C7group. In addition to consutling with small and mid-sized businesses, he also speaks on social business culture, strategy, and tactics. He blogs at JeffMarmins.com and can be found at @jeffmarmins.

The Online Community Strategy Topics That We Chatted About:

Social business vs. the hype
The social business discovery process
First steps after identifying opportunity
Common trends in using social technology to improve business performance
How mid-sized businesses approach social business and online communities
The importance of an iterative social business culture
The role of social media policies and community management procedures in managing risk

ProCommunity #10: The Science of Online Community Management

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 11:45:00 GMT

Discussing How Data Drives Great Online Community Management with Rich Millington

Richard Millington joins us for this installment of ProCommunity, the show where online communities meet business performance.

Rich is the founder of FeverBee, an online community consultancy. Along with working with some of the world's largest organizations to improve the impact of their online member and customer comunities, Rich also runs The Pillar Summit, an exclusive course in professional community management. Rich blogs proliphically at FeverBee.com and can also be found at @RichMillington.

The Online Community Management Topics That We Chatted About:

Common challenges facing online community management today
The importance and power of data-driven online community management
Why proactive community managers get better results
How to ensure your community manager is spending their time on the right activities
The ways the community management changes throughout an online community’s lifecycle
The characteristics of a successful online community manager
Advice for young online community managers

ProCommunity Extras

Watch Rich Millington’s webinar with Socious on data-driven community management
Register for The Pillar Summit course that starts on Septmber 24, 2012
Get the ‘Keep Calm and Build Community’ poster mentioned in this episode or download a free printable mini-poster.

ProCommunity #9: How to Build a Roadmap for Creating a Social Business Culture

Tue, 04 Sep 2012 13:25:00 GMT

Discussing How to Humanize Your Business & Online Community with Jamie Notter

Jamie Notter joins us for this episode of ProCommunity, the show where online communities meet business performance.

Jamie is a Vice President at consulting firm, Management Solutions Plus. Jamie also co-authored the book, Humanize: How People-Centric Organizations Succeed in a Social World with our friend, Maddie Grant. In addition, Jamie authored the 2007 ebook, Generational Diversity in the Workplace, as well as published We Have Always Done It That Way: 101 Things About Associations We Must Change in 2006. Jamie can be found at GetMeJamieNotter.com.

The Social Business Culture Topics That We Chatted About:

The changes that require companies to be more open, trustworthy, generative, and courageous
How to build a more human and productive culture
Examples of people-centric organizations
Creating a cultural framework for building online customer communities and other collaborative environments
What are organizations getting wrong about social media and online communities?
Deciding who should interact with customers and other important stakeholder
Finding the right balance of transparency in an organization
How to get started changing your business culture
Shifting culture from anywhere in a company vs. making top-down changes

ProCommunity #8: What is Online Community Management & What Can It Do For You?

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 11:34:00 GMT

Discussing Online Community Management with Tim McDonald

Tim McDonald joins us for this installment of ProCommunity, the show where online communities meet business performance.

Tim is the Online Community Manager at HuffPost Live. Tim also runs My Community Manager, a group committed to advancing the role of community management within organizations. In addition, Tim is the host of #CoffeeTime chat. Tim can be found at @tamcdonald.

The Online Community Management Topics That We Chatted About

What is online community management?
Online community management duties, tools, and tricks.
Social media manager vs. online community manager
Infusing community management into an existing business
How good community management can help an organization
Online community management and the C-suite
Is there one correct way to manage and grow an online community?
Ways that online community managers can maximize their time
The role of automation in building community online
Online community management for a known brand
The importance of community management in launching HuffPost Live

How Government-Owned Online Communities Engage the Public [Transcript]

Sun, 26 Aug 2012 13:11:00 GMT

In episode #7 of Socious’ social business podcast, ProCommunity, I spoke with Joseph Porcelli, the Director of Engagement Services at GovDelivery and founder of NeighborsforNeighbors.org, the country’s first neighborhood-centric urban social network. We discussed how government agencies are using online communities to empower citizens.

The conversation also included how to get your audience to work together, successful approaches to social network adoption, and measuring ROI for online communities.

ProCommunity #7 Transcript: How to Build a More Social Government Using Owned Online Communities

Josh: Welcome to episode # 7 of ProCommunity - the show where online community meets business performance. I'm Josh Paul. You can see all of the episodes of ProCommunity at socious.com as well as subscribe to it as an audio podcast on iTunes for your long commute home. I'm very pleased to have with me today, Joseph Porcelli, Director of Engagement Services at GovDelivery, a really interesting firm that helps government agencies connect with the public in more expansive and valuable ways, and we're going to get into a lot of that during this episode. Joseph also founded NeighborsForNeighbors.org - the nation's first neighborhood-centric, urban social network. Welcome, Joseph.

Joseph: Thanks for having me. Great to be here.

Josh: Thanks for being here. So, let's get right into this because there's a lot of information that we want to cover. Why is government doing this? Why are government agencies building communities and engaging constituents in online communities?

Joseph: I think it comes down to some basic needs, actually. It's that there's greater demand for services, there are less resources to fund and execute those services, and people have expectations now that, with social media, that they can get access to information and help that they want, in newer ways that are faster and more, I guess, in line with what they expect and how they're used to. So tools like social networking or collaboration platforms for government help government achieve those three things.

Josh: So, most people are most familiar with online communities in the context of business or membership organizations - where the line to sales or member attention are a lot more straightforward, but with government it's really about changing a behavior with a massive audience. How is that possible? And did I get that right?

Joseph: Yeah, I think you're pretty darn close. Government really cares about some basic things. They want people to be safe, they want them to be healthy, they want them to have shelter, they want them to have education, they want them to be able to prosper and grow and contribute to the greater good. So, there are lots of different tools and different ways to do that, but something that gets lost is really what are we trying to accomplish? What matters? What is the mission and what are the mission objectives? So, here at GovDelivery and our social network that we operate called govloop.com, we work to help connect and empower government to execute their mission effectively and efficiently.

Josh: You're not only empowering government. People on different sides of the issue may look at a government-sponsored online community and say "I don't need more government", but in talking to you and learning about GovDelivery, you're really not only empowering government but you're empowering the public. A big part of what you do is getting the public to learn something and share it with other constituents. Is that correct?

Joseph: It is, and I think really what it comes down to is flirting and exploring with the role of what can a citizen do. What impacts can citizens make to make a difference in their daily lives and those of their neighbors, those they may work with, study with, or worship with. So if we think about engagement and we think about the typical definition: people think civic engagement means going to the polls and voting, super important, it's great, but as we're faced with dwindling resources and we're faced with increases for demand of government services, the role of citizen, in my opinion, and what we're starting to see is that it's increasing. And we have an engagement funnel, and the last phase of the engagement funnel we call leadership.

What we're really looking to do with these online communities is to expand the role of citizen to co-create, co-organize, or act in partnership with government, to take that message or to encourage people to change their behavior; or join the CERT program. For example, with FEMA, an assist emergency responders during emergencies or whenever they're needed, so it's a very interesting and fun opportunity to work on. Because if you think about all of the folks who volunteer in the country and all of the skill and the resources that we have as citizens, there's a lot we can do. I have this, I call it the perimeter of community, and it's something that everyone can think about. So, if you think about your community or the immediate folks that you care about or may be in service of, you think of your family, right? You may think of your spouse, or your immediate friends, or whatever it is; but what we're really working on is expanding that perimeter out past your dwelling unit; your home, or your apartment, or wherever you are, out to your neighbors. Then out past your immediate neighbors to the end of your block, or to the end of your road if you live on a farm, or wherever that is, right?

So, it's an exciting time because we're not only seeing more and more people want to take this on, they're pulling it, and there's lots of great social innovation with open data where people are taking information that the government has and doing awesome things with it. Like helping people find when the next bus is coming, which for me helps a lot. So that's a long, expanded answer to your question, but it really comes down to what else can we do together; and government really sees itself not as a solution but a platform. It facilitates inspiring and providing people with the tools and the data to make contributions to improve their daily lives.

Josh: So an important element in a successful government online community is to really think about it as citizen-centric, rather than government-centric.

Joseph: That is a very good way to put it. There are a couple projects that I worked on, really part of the internal objectives are to reduce the distance from what Washington thinks is important, to what the community knows the impact really needs to be and bridge that gap and have there be real-time collaboration and feedback. So, the knowledge is shepherded, it's asked of the public, shepherded back inside the agency and their systems can be changed, or tweaked, or reinvented to accommodate, to actually get the mission objective done; based on the feedback of the what the citizens say, "No, actually this is what we need."

Josh: How did you get involved in helping state and federal government build communities and engage the public? So let's back up a minute.

Joseph: Sure. Totally by accident. If you asked me, in my last career I was an ACT certified consultant, you know ACT database, and this was back in 2004. What happened was I was walking home and one of my neighbors came up to me and said, "Hey man, I just got mugged at gunpoint, and I saw some other guy get pistol whipped." I'm like, "What?" and this is just down the street from my house. I was freaked out, I'm a big guy, he was a big guy, I thought I didn't have anything to worry about, but apparently I did. So, I did a bunch of research and found out that people were getting mugged walking home from the "T" all the time, this is the "T" or the Metro in Boston, where I was living. People weren't communicating.

They weren't communicating with each other and they weren't communicating with the police department and it turned out the same couple folks were mugging multiple people time and time again because people weren't communicating and I'm like "that's dumb". So let's do something about it. So, I just started organizing events in my neighborhood, bringing neighbors together where they would meet at neighborhood socials, and then we started doing organizing events where neighbors would create community service projects and social activities based on their interests, and they would stay together over time. T

hrough that organizing, I created a problem where I actually couldn't keep up with all the interest and the enthusiasm the community showed. And, this is really before, this is 2004-2005, so technology hadn't really caught up to all this interest yet, right?

So, I wound up, through a number of trial and error and different platforms building this social network for the city of Boston, neighborsforneighbors.org that connected neighbors to each other and their civil servants, so they can work together.

What I really looked to was remove myself as the bottleneck. I was willing to do this work, and I was doing this for fun, but I knew that I was a limitation. So I looked at technology to facilitate that, so it'd be more effective, more efficient, and would increase engagement which would mean people were safer and people had more exercise together and more volunteers to local non-profits and the police department could reach thousands of people instantly to mobilize them to take action.

So essentially what happened there, I wound up being recruited to Boston police and worked there as a community organizer for a number of years; and worked on some special technology projects. I had a technology background, so I like to think of myself as an organizer with a technology problem.

So, I just tried lots of different things there and then wound up working on the service nation campaign, which was all about service if you remember during the last election resulted in the passage of the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act, which was an awesome experience. And then I worked on sharing the story of neighbors for neighbors for about a year, all around the country. Telling different cities and federal agencies what it is they could do with social networking, and then had the great fortune to work on a project for Secretary Napolitano and Commissioner Bersin at CBP at the time for a social network on border affairs.

Then about a year later, the stars aligned and I got to work with my friend Steve Ressler, who founded Govloop.com, and we've been supporting each other - as we're both kind of on the forefront of this realm, if you will, and then joined the GovDelivery team.

So now I not only get to work on one or two projects, there are multiple. It's lots of fun, and I get to work with really inspiring folks who are very committed to public service and help build these tools and platforms, that really empower and bring government together to work inter-agency, but also with the public; to make a difference in people's lives every day. It's awesome.

Josh: It's a great story, and I think it's interesting that your background comes from building communities in communities, rather than coming from the enterprise 2.0 world, and trying to apply it to communities. You really came from solving a problem, and finding a solution to a problem.

Joseph: Yeah. That's a very good way to put it, There are a lot of online communities that come together and serve a very important purpose and are very good at it, but there's something I remind folks of all the time, that time together face to face, there's nothing like it. Scott Heffernan, who is the CEO of meetup.com, a friend and mentor, says we use Meetup online to get together offline.

You and I met face to face, and we had a great conversation. I remember meeting you, and there's an experience you have when you're face to face that nothing digital can ever replicate. But, since we can't be together face to face, because of time or because of distance, this is the second best alternative that allows people to communicate and collaborate to get things done.

Josh: So what role do online communities and sharing and collaboration play in how governments communicate with the public? Can you give me some examples of the over-arching themes that you're seeing?

Joseph: Sure. Again, it really comes down to changing behaviors, and it comes down to trying to make the United States a better place for its citizens, and folks around the world. So, I'll share a couple examples with you. The first one I'll share is community.fema.gov. That's a project that we're working on right now. It is the online home for the National Preparedness Coalition and folks are using it to empower themselves to prepare, but also to share resources and best practices so that they can influence the community who trust them or they have access to, if you will, to coordinate preparedness events all around the country.

So, FEMA's very smart about this. They know that when people learn about preparedness at work they take it back home with them and they take what they've learned and they prepare their families and they share with their neighbors and their friends, and they take it to church if they go to church and they share it with folks in their congregation.

So, there's a lot of good science behind it, but up to this point there really hasn't been a way where FEMA can take the expansive reach that it has and, through its different government partners, bring everybody together in one community, where they can share their message. Where the folks who have done the work before can help those who are just starting, share their knowledge, share their experiences. What's really cool is we start to see discussions where people say this is really helpful and I didn't know so many people care about this, I didn't know there was so much knowledge, there was so much activity.

So there becomes a great sense of pride and camaraderie among the members that really motivates them and sustains them, and builds upon the diversity of the base that's doing this. So, if you talk to folks who have run volunteer programs before, the challenge is to keep bringing new folks in, to keep that spirit alive, and to reward and acknowledge which, unfortunately gets undermined, folks who have been committed for a really long time. So, it just keeps the momentum and the inspiration and the knowledge shared and brewing among everybody. So, that's one example.

Another project we're working on is if you go to connect.mep.com, it's the Manufacturing Extension Partnership program, of NIST, the National Institute for Standards and Technology, and that community is being used by a number of different programs, and what they're doing is to share what it is that each of these manufacturing extension partnership centers are doing all around the country. And, they're made up of government, academic, manufacturing cohorts, and they're sharing their knowledge. Because when they share their knowledge what works best here, can also work great somewhere else.

That means that there's more innovation, which means there's more demand for products, which means there are more jobs and the economy does better. So, it's really neat the way this can be used. Did you have a question?

Josh: No. I like the way when you're talking about online communities and government, you're talking about connecting it to, it's not just an online place to collaborate and share. You're connecting it to other programs and other opportunities for people. Something I hear you talk about a lot is allowing people to work together to solve problems, but also, to take advantage of opportunities. So there's an awareness-building component in here to offline and other online programs.

Joseph: Yeah. So FEMA is all about helping people prepare so we're safer and more resilient. MEP is about increasing innovation, jobs, and boosting the economy. So, there are very serious, very important programs that government is using technology to do this. One thing I do want to underscore too, it's not just about the platform.

There are lots of great platforms out there, but it really has a lot to do with the strategy. Is the strategy align with real-world environments? Do people really want to do this? Is there a buy-in? What do people care about? How do we motivate them? So, those are all really important questions to ask. I just wanted to underscore that for a second. That has to be built into the strategy, has to be built into the tone of how the community's managed, and has to be something community members experience and are proud of, or at least they're aware that this is how things are working; because that creates workability within the community itself.

Josh: I agree, we always say in technology, the platform is about 50% of the equation. There's a lot more that goes into it to make it a successful, thriving community that helps people solve the right problems.

Joseph: That's right.

Josh: And I just want to underscore, again, that awareness building of taking advantage of opportunities through social sharing. Do you have any examples of that happening, in the wild?

Joseph: Well, I actually have a great example. There's a community called Navy for Moms, and a friend of mine runs that community. It's really cool. The problem was the Navy was having a hard time recruiting folks to join the Navy and they found out that moms were the biggest barrier for people to join. So, the Navy did something really spectacularly cool. They created a community that is run by and governed by moms, and the Navy can't actually intervene or put information there. So the moms are actually communicating, "Here's my experience, here's what happened," and it's so authentic, and the moms actually talk to each other online and offline, that recruiting was actually increased. They were able to bring in more folks to participate in the work that Army does for the number of positions that they had available. So it was a very progressive, very, very cool way to solve a problem that the Navy needed to deal with.

Josh: That's a great example, and it also highlights what you just said about strategy, and the importance of the platform. They probably select the right platform, but that wouldn't have been successful without that strategic thinking and that creativity, in the case of Navy for Moms.

Joseph: Absolutely. Again it relies on the passion of the community. People are not a commodity, and if you begin to treat them as a commodity, like they're just going to do this action thing for us, it's just not going to work. If it does work, it'll happen for just a very short period of time, and then it won't. You really need to respect, you need to trust, and you need to treat your community members as leaders and co-facilitators. They have to be seen that way and they need to see each other that way, more importantly.

Josh: I agree. So, let's get into some of the biggest challenges government agencies have in building online communities. What are you seeing out there?

Joseph: So, the biggest thing for government is there is a lot of policy out there. It's taken a number of years to make progress here, but the biggest one is the communities need to meet their privacy standards, which are pretty darn stringent, along with their security standards. So GovDelivery in our collaboration solution, we meet all those requirements. So government can actually use our SaaS software. So that's probably one of the bigger challenges, and then you need to have terms of service agreements for some of the social software. Which they're caught up to speed and you can actually go to howto.gov if you're interested in learning more about that.

There's a lot of great information about that, but those are some of the challenges. And, then it's the same challenges that many organizations face. What are we supposed to do? I want 100,000 followers. Why? I don't know, because I do. If that's your strategy, you're not going to get there, and if you do your followers are going to have a horrible experience; and that's not going to work out for anybody. So, the same challenges that everybody else faces.

Josh: That makes sense, and that piece translates to what we see in the for-profit association, and user group world. If an executive comes back from a conference and says "we need an online community", that's a red flag right there. There are a lot of questions that need to be asked. What are we trying to solve for our customers? What are we trying to solve for our organization? Can you talk for a second about some successful approaches to adoption and growing the community?

We've covered why collaboration and building community is important, why engaging the public is important, some of the risks and challenges that people face. So you have the community. What are some tips for growing the community and building adoption?

Joseph: Sure, I would say the first thing is a community needs to see itself as leadership, as leaders. So when folks see themselves leading they feel proud. They know there are results and accountability there, and so folks will share and tell other folks who might be interested to join. That, I think, is very effective. You need to have that authenticity there.

The other thing that we have as an organization that has been very effective is we have a service called outreach acceleration, so the GovDelivery collaboration solution is one of our three products. Another product is called the digital communication management product. Which is what government uses to reach the public, so there are over 35 million subscribers to this platform.

They receive e-mail and text-based communication, and it manages all the metrics and the social sharing for these agencies. So, because government's mission is so aligned, we can help facilitate partnerships and execute communication campaigns on behalf of one agency with another which can drive membership very quickly to online communities or e-mail subscriptions to another agency, because we know there are 3 million subscribers who are interested this particular topic. So, it's a really powerful and efficient, effective way for agencies to get the word out through their partners to folks who have already said they're interested in preparedness, or emergencies, or disasters in FEMA's case for example.

Josh: You bring up a good point. Why is it so important to build on what the community has already done, or what the agency has in place? The relationships they have with other parts of government and the outreach they've already done with the public, why is that important in building an online community?

Joseph: Sure. I think there are a couple things here. What I care about as a citizen, I'm going to step out of my role here, is I really do want government to be effective and very efficient. So, if there's someone out there that's interested in, they run a neighborhood association or they're a pastor at a church, or they're responsible for emergency preparedness at work; this individual or that group of individuals is looking for government to tell them what to do, like "how do I do this? I'm not sure, I need your help".

So, if we think about having an online community where government can reach these folks or being able to communicate out to them, imagine all the time and money can be saved by program coordinators or program managers if there's one place to go where there are folks who've said, "Yes, hello, I'll take these actions, you just need to tell me what to do." So, if there are ten programs that can serve one person and they're in one place, that's a ton of savings for government and they can put the money into the programs that need additional funding, to deliver the services to the citizens.

Josh: I think that that makes sense. Let's talk for a second about employees of the government and employees of certain agencies. How does strengthening the connections between the agency and the public benefit government employees, and the agencies that they work for? So we talked about how it helps the public, how does it help the agency and the people who run the agency?

Joseph: Well, I'll tell you one of the most satisfying parts of my job is that the folks who work in government are really committed and passionate about the work that they do, and it's hard. There's typically been a lot of bureaucracy, and it's hard for them to really move the needle in the programs where they've been working really hard and are passionate about.

It's wonderful to see a client see the community just taking off, and people having a very positive experience, thanking each other, and giving the agency good feedback. I think it's a huge morale boost. It really helps them execute on their mission and in their particular program. So, it's a morale booster, and I think it also helps create a further sense of meaning and value in their job. Folks who are working in government chose to be in government because they really want to serve the public and our software helps to reach the public and helps the public work together on behalf of government to get stuff done.

Josh: There isn't a technology or an initiative or strategy out there that can be a game changer, the way an online community can be a game changer. Both for the organization, the people who run the organization, as well as the customers. Putting in a new e-mail marketing system's not going to change the game, but building a community and just the potential it has for current initiatives and future initiatives is unparalleled.

Joseph: Yeah, I think it's definitely a mix of tools. You need to be able to reach the public, you need to be able to have a place for the community to realize and work together, and kind of act on your behalf. I think things are coming together and it's a very exciting time for government and for citizens to be able to accelerate, and to execute on their mission effectively and efficiently.

Josh: So, if I'm the head of a government agency or the head of technology for a state agency or federal agency, what kind of return on investment metrics can I expect?

Joseph: That's a great question. There are some simple things. Like, if you digitize, if you don't have to send out paper statements for your utility bills, or you don't have to send out paper statements for certain notifications, how much money can you save? I have a calculator that I actually use, and it's unbelievably, it's awesome how much money they can save converting from paper to digital. That's just straight numbers, just do the math.

The other thing is, I think there's a return on investment around expectations. Citizens expect government to be able to communicate with them, when they need to be communicated with. If there's a tornado coming, I want to know that there's a tornado coming. That's your job, tell me when it's coming. So, when people are notified they feel great, government has done their job. So there are around those expectations which are important.

Then I would also say it really comes down to the mission objectives again, are we making people safe? Are more people healthy? Are people getting their flu shot, for example. Do students who are looking to go to school get access to apply to loans and get the information they need? That is a return on investment. So if you can show that 10% more students applied for a particular loan, you know that's a huge return on investment because typically the costs associated with those increments have been very high. Often, the costs go down, but the value goes up when you use digital technologies to communicate and collaborate with the public.

Josh: I think that really hits home, just the importance of maximizing engagement.

Joseph: Absolutely.

Josh: It's not a one-time campaign, it's not a one-time strategy. It evolves over time, the more you learn about how your public would like to engage, the community strategy for the agency evolves, as well.

Joseph: That's right. It's an ongoing process, and there's a lot of talk about the social business. This is really, we're seeing this. It's awesomely powerful, it's producing great results. I think it's definitely raising the bar on service level, on motivation, on pride of service if you will, for the government. So it's very cool.

Josh: Now, consumer engagement over social channels really influences the way that constituents expect to interact with government.

Joseph: Yes.

Josh: Talk about some of the risks that government runs, if they don't engage their community.

Joseph: Sure. First of all, the conversation's already happening. I would say some of the biggest risks that government needs to mitigate are misinformation. Folks hear things, they start tweeting things, it's all over Facebook, it may or may not be accurate, and when it comes to safety or health government really needs to make sure that that information is accurate and needs to participate in those channels and interact with folks in a way that provides a clear message but also builds trust. Because if you want folks to interact on your behalf you need to have trust; you also need to be human.

TSA has a heck of a job doing this, and if you look at blog.tsa.gov you'll see that they use humor, they use facts, and they have a terrific job, and so much that they have to deal every day. But I think they do it pretty well over there. And their team certainly mitigates those risks in a very effective way. I know the folks over there, and I have nothing but the utmost respect for what they get done very day for the public.

Josh: So, do you recommend that an agency who's looking at engaging the public in a more expansive way; do you recommend a wholesale change in the way they do business? Are there some small steps that agencies can take to build community?

Joseph: I would say that there are small steps you can take. If you look at what we recommend folks is if you're not using an outbound system of delivery, digital communication management to reach the public, I wouldn't look at that in terms of what you're going to get but what you're going to save. You're going to reach, we have some agencies like the state of Indiana, for example, has something like 1.3 million subscribers. It's 15% of the population or something like that, that's awesome.

They can reach so many people so quickly and get the information out which is really fantastic. But for an agency that's just looking to get in the game, there's just so much money they can save and communication really is the backbone of the operation if you're dealing with citizens.

Citizens want information, you can change their behavior, you can offer them value, and with some of the automation that our system has. I think the biggest fear that agencies have is how many hours is this going to take, how many people do we have to assign to this, but we have automation built into the system that watches webpages for changes and automatically takes on an alert. There's all kinds of great efficiencies in that, so that it will save them money. You can reach more people and save money at the same time.

Josh: That's outstanding. So it really takes government out of the software business and in the people business, where they should be.

Joseph: Yup.

Josh: So, you're a rising star in the Washington D.C. area, and you're often asked to speak to an agency about how they can increase engagement. If you're speaking to a room full of government employees, government officials, high-ranking people in federal and state agencies, about how to build community and how to engage the public; what is the one takeaway you'd want them to leave the room with?

Joseph: That's a great question. I'm going to break it into two parts, I'm going to cheat. So, the first part of the one takeaway I would really say is you don't have to solve world peace at one thing. You can take a step and start with a pilot, and see how it goes and learn from that. Those are very important wins, and I think sometimes we think too big, and we need to just start with something that's digestible that we have time to do that we can do a proof of concept, if you will.

The second part of my one answer to your question would be, really focus on what it is the community wants and needs and build that into your plan. That shouldn't be what you ask afterward, those should be the first questions you start with.

Josh: Well, Joseph, I really appreciate your time today, in giving us this well-rounded view of some of the strategies that government can use to engage the public. Before we go, where can people find you on the web?

Joseph: Sure. So, you can find me on Twitter. I'm @JosephPorcelli, my last name is spelled P-O-R-C-E-L-L-I. You can also find me blogging on reachthepublic.com, which is our company blog. I also blog at josephporcelli.com.

Josh: Great. For people who are interested in neighbors for neighbors, is that still expanding, or is it really just in the Massachusetts area?

Joseph: So, it's just in the Boston area, and it's neigbhorsforneighbors.org, and it's F-O-R, and both neighbors have an 's' on the end.

Josh: Great. Well, as always, you can see all the episodes of ProCommunity at socious.com. You can also subscribe to the show on iTunes, where five-star ratings and great reviews are appreciated if you like what you heard today. Joseph, again, I want to thank you again, thank you for your time today, and have a great day.

Joseph: Thanks so much. Thanks for having me, and thanks for letting me tell the story about all the awesome work folks are doing in government, really appreciate it.

Josh: Keep it up. It's really exciting.

Joseph: Thank you.

ProCommunity #7: Government 2.0, Engaging the Public, & Social Networking in Government

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 12:22:00 GMT

Discussing Social Government with Joseph Porcelli

Joseph Porcelli joins us for this installment of ProCommunity, the show where online communities meet business performance.

Joseph is the Director of Engagement Services at GovDelivery, a company that helps public sector organizations engage the public in more valuable and expansive ways. Along with GovDelivery and its social network for government employees, govloop, Joseph is also the founder of NeighborsforNeighbors.org, the country’s first neighborhood-centric urban social network. Joseph can be found at @JosephPorcelli.

The Online Community Engagement Topics That We Chatted About

Why is government building, and engaging constituents in, online communities?
How to get the public to work together to co-create, solve problems, and take advantage of opportunities
How FEMA's private social network helps the agency educate about preparedness and empower people to assist during emergencies
The importance of online communities, sharing, and collaboration in how governments communicate with the public
How the online community, NavyforMoms.com, improved the US Navy's recruiting results
The biggest challenges of Government 2.0
Successful approaches to adoption and growing community in the public sector
How government employees and the agencies they work for benefit from strengthening connections with the public and among each other
Measuring ROI for government online communities and social media
Small steps government agencies can take to engage their communities

How Private Social Networks & Customer Reference Programs Work Together [Transcript]

Sun, 19 Aug 2012 14:34:00 GMT

In episode #6 of Socious’ social business podcast, ProCommunity, I spoke with Bill Lee, President of the Customer Reference Forum and author of the new book, The Hidden Wealth of Customers. We discussed the power of customer reference programs and how online customer community provide new ways recruit, manage, and engage customer advocates.

The conversation also included how to get at the untapped value that existing customers can create, the role of online customer communities in managing customer relationships, and real examples of customer reference program success.

ProCommunity #6 Transcript: How Customer Communities Multiple The Power of Customer Reference Programs

Josh: Welcome to episode number 6 of ProCommunity, the show where online community meets business performance. I'm Josh Paul. As always, you can see all of the episodes of ProCommunity at Socious.com. You can also subscribe to this show as an audio podcast in iTunes. I am very pleased to have with me today Bill Lee, one of the pioneers in reinventing how businesses view customer relationships.

Bill is the president of the Customer Strategy Group, and the author of the new book, The Hidden Wealth of Customers. He also founded the largest community of customer engagement and advocacy professionals in the customer reference forum and the event, the summit on customer engagement which we'll talk about a little bit later. Welcome, Bill.

Bill: Thanks, Josh. It's good to be here. Thanks for having me.

Josh: Thanks for being here. Your work, your strategy work, your writing, your events, are some of the well-known in the industry. How did you get involved in customer engagement?

Bill: Well, that's a good question. It was kind of happen-stance. I had a business years ago. Really, just kind of a small side business, in which I stumbled into these people through some referrals. People who were running customer reference programs in places like Hewlett Packard, at Lucent, which is now Alcatel Lucent, Intel and some other places. And I didn't really know these people existed. This is about 10 years ago. And that's how I found out, you know, these people are doing something really interesting.

You're cultivating their customers who would be references to help their sales people close deals, to help their marketing people, provide them with good customer content, be interviewed by the media and so forth. They've actually got people who are cultivating those relationships and it's pretty powerful stuff. So I thought, you know, this is interesting. And then I asked a few of them, I said “yeah with professional group or professional association so you can get together with your peers”. As I got to the point where they are asking me to connect them with each other, “Hey, do you know the, my counterpart, was the customer reference with Intel or IBM or at some place.” And so I was with people. Yeah, I had to say let's put a show. Let's have a party. And so we did. We got a lot more people than we expected. This is in 2005 and the rest was history.

Josh: Wow. So you've seen a lot of changes over the past decade plus.

Bill: Yeah. I mean, in that time, social media is taking off and coming to its own. You know, the problems with traditional marketing had become more and more serious. There's just a lot of, we got new technologies that are very interesting. Automated customer content, applying gamification, technology to the advocacy process.

Josh: Now, one of the basic, you know, foundational ideas in the hidden wealth of the customers is that the traditional model of growing businesses is slowly dying. Slowly fading because it's not working. Why is that?

Bill: Well, at some cases, it's slow and some cases, it's pretty fast. And to be more precise, my position is that marketing, traditional marketing is dying. In fact, it's some cases, in some industries, it's pretty well dead. And there's 3 reasons that I think it's becoming particularly true now. One is that we're seeing studies from Forster, from the McKenzie, about the buyer's decision journey and they're making up their mind about buying your product in service before they ever engage with your marketing efforts, your advertising, your POR, the reason your sales peak. Secondly, there was a devastating study publishes last year by a group in London, showing that CEOs have lost patience with traditional approaches, to marketing, and with their CMOs. It was just devastating. Something like 3/4, and average of about 3/4 in each questions about “do you think that your CMO is credible? Do you think marketing provides a return on investment? What do you think about the marketing's approach to social media. In each case, it was horrible. It was 3 and 4 CEO said we don't think marketing is credible. We don't know where or when it goes and they need to start telling this. We think that they're pursuing social media like they would need other fad and they're still not showing us what's our return in these investments. They're trying to brand it. And hearing about brand equity and other branding concepts that can't be tied to any return on investment. So that's the second reason. And then third, marketing doesn't make sense if you think about it in today's environment, because you're asking people. You are in marketing communications people, agencies, sales people, contractors, and so forth, don't come from the buyer's world and you're asking them to persuade the buyer to do something. That's a fundamentally flawed model. So that's why I said marketing is dying, traditional marketing.

Josh: When most business people think about engaging their customer or, you know, developing a strong reference program, I think the paradigm still focuses on the very end of the sale cycle. You know, I'm going to have some people on the hook that I can, you know, send their contact information to my prospect, so the prospect can reach out to them to validate that we are real people, we do good business and, you know, it's basically references.

Bill: Perfect.

Josh: You know, describe the broader view in the pieces that a lot of business people are missing in terms of the value that existing customers can bring to the table.

Bill: Yeah. You're right. The reference model where the broader, the sales people scouring around to find the reference they need to close their deal is just not really relevant, anymore. It's still an important part of the overall sales process but you want to bring your customers into the whole buyer's decisions or any process as early as possible. Because when buyers are looking for solutions now, they want to talk to, you know, they want to talk to their peers, and that includes your customers. So you want to bring them in the awareness growing phase, in the education phases as much as possible, to let them learn from your customer's success and experience with solving problems that your buyers understand and give away to, as supposed to trying to get them interested in your features, in your benefits, and these sort of things. They're just not interested.

Josh: So I suppose the natural extension to the benefits that a company can see, the tangible, benefits by doing this are shorter sales cycle, more wins?

Bill: Yeah. Leads that are generated. Deals that are closed, awareness in your market. Yeah. All the above. You can show, for example, one of my favorite examples is when Mark Benioff was starting Salesforce.com, and tried to figure out his little tiny venture funded farm is going to compete against, you know, Oracle or SAP or multimillion dollar advertising bushes. And almost an act of desperation, he said, “You know, we got to come up with something different.”

He realized that a customer event that he was hosting, this was in Philadelphia, really are, his company was just starting. And he was playing this presentation to a pretty small group, this is back when nobody knew who he was or knew salesforce.com was, is making this presentation. And he was like, Okay, that didn't seem to go all that well.

But then during Q and A, as he was responding the questions, he found his customers would weigh in on the answers. And then he realized the prospects and the customers, they start talking to each other, he realized that his prospect wanted to tell to his customers, more than they did him, and he realized that they were selling. They went back and ran the numbers and they found that events like that where prospect can engage with customers in that way, 80% of those prospects became customers themselves. That's in the fact that 80% closer rate.

Josh: That's interesting. We see the same thing in the customer communities that we work with. One of the things that we encourage people to do is open up parts of that community to prospects, you know, with limited functionality. They don't need to get overwhelmed with everything that you offer, everything that the normalization offers customers, but to be able to interact with customers and get a sense not only of the value that the company brings but also have some interaction with customers in a controlled environment.

Bill: Well, that's right. And you raised a good point that it's, you know, seriously, early on like that at these battings in office holding. I would guess that most of those prospects showing up were intrigued by this new model of, you know, of hosted software, what we call Cloud Computing now. They were intrigued by it. What they really wanted to was talk to people like them, who are solving problems that they had. And then the features and the benefits and so forth with Salesforce.com's platform were incidental. What they really wanted was connection with somebody facing the same issues and challenges that they were and were solving them. So it's important. When you build these communities or bring customers together with prospects, focus on your prospects issues, not your product concerns.

Josh: I think that's important in community building, in marketing in general. I mean, you really see a shift from product oriented marketing or in successful marketing from being product oriented to educational, insightful and helpful, and you're saying carries over to, you know, the sales process and...

Bill: Yeah. The sales and the marketing process. What is your customer, you know, I think a referral should be able to sit down and decide what are the 4 or 5 issues, you know, our customer, you know, prospects or a buyer's terms, what are the issues that they're dealing with that we can help them solve? Then focus your sure communications on those issues, and they'll get the message that it's your product that's solving these issues. Trust me, that will happen. But focus on those issues. That's how you get their attentions.

Josh: So I mean for most companies, getting their community of customers to market and sell and create products for them seems like a myth. Seems like it's too complicated or out of the norm of what they're used to doing. How real is this?

Bill: Well, yeah. It's, if you haven't, you know, I've lived with these programs and these efforts for years now. So it's like, everybody know this, and you're right. That people haven't seen this or lived with it, it's like you got to be kidding. But, I'll give you a few examples.

You know, the best are example, rather than theory or whatever. So there you got Salesforce.com. Putting customers together with buyers early on the sales process, and conferring them into buyers. Turning those buyers into those prospects and the customers.

Another example - SAS Canada had a problem with customer retention. Their customer retention rates were, which are usually high for that company in the high 90s, it started falling off pretty precipitously. And you think, well, can we get our customers to help with that, that seems like a pretty unusual problem. What can our customers do to help with that? Well, SAS organized their, what they call Customer Champions around in Canada. They organized, they have 250 of these plus another 50 with what they called Super Champs. These are customers that understood the power, the benefits of SAS Canada solutions, they were using them every day. Well, they organized an executive council. They started putting on live events in 21 cities around the country. Newsletter was started, online forum, and they started bringing customers together who were in danger of defecting or who were wondering how to address issues that they think SAS Canada's software could address. They started getting them together in all these ways. Long story short, that retention problem was completely solved. It went right back up the high 90s.

Josh: That's a great example. And I like that you're using examples too because that's exactly what we're talking about here. We're not talking about a company, you know, spouting off the benefits of a program. Saying here's how it actually help solve an actual problem.

Bill: That's right. And in similar stories, in innovation. There are similar stories, you know, sales, retention, in marketing and awareness building through your social media efforts. Intel found they had number on this. Some of which they share and some of which they won't. But they share enough to give an idea of how powerful customer content is and their social media efforts.

They learned that we got to stop talking about ourselves. We got stop talking about products. We got to stop talking about our features and benefits. They don't care. Let's put customer stories up there and customer videos. Brief customer success stories. Let fire engage with our customers. And there are the things that just sky rocketed their demand generation success, awareness building and so forth. So this...

Josh: That's powerful.

Bill: ... is all over the place. It's happening. It's not just there. It's really happening.

Josh: Now that's powerful. I think, I mean one of the takeaways of this conversation is, you know, read the book. Like these examples, a lot of these examples are in your book and really bring it home. How has the role of online customer communities emerged in both managing customer relationships and unlocking this additional value in those relationships?

Bill: Well, there's a couple of other things to keep in mind with online communities. Online communities, I think some companies regard these as a potential answer in themselves. And these are in my experience and observation, they are powerful part of the answer. When they're in conjunction with some of the relationship building, sometime in personal relationship building I've been talking about, in corporation events, are extremely powerful. And then, now I'd be curious, sir, about your experience with your clients. But what I'm observing is that the online communities are a powerful way to keep people in touch. And then the in-person wants are powerful way to bond and cement those relationships. So when you can have the live events to bond people and then have the online events to keep them in touch and to keep them active.

Josh: We see the same thing. We work with, you know, large companies and user groups and associations. So we see the entire spectrum of the ways that online communities, online customer communities are being used. But one of the things that we realized early on in this, you know, before social business was coined, before social media was even a term, was the importance of live events in community building. So, you know, the one of the most feature rich areas of our platform is the conference management and events management system that's integrated with the rest of the online community software, so that going into the conference, you have your most engaged members aware and attending the live event and then coming out of the conference, the discussions can continue pretty smoothly and most of our customers in all 3 of those areas and, you know, for profit, user groups and associations are using that, those elements.

Bill: You know, Salesforce.com kinda fast forward their story. Now, you know, first, they were called City Tour Events, the one I described earlier. And the first one that Mark Benioff did, I think they got 15 people. They did 50, you know, 15 showed but he learned. Now, Dreamforce is getting, you know, I think the one last year got 45,000 registrations or something like that. It takes up half of downtown San Francisco. It's magnificent. They're doing very clever integration of their online with their live. And they've got this kind of Facebook like interface that attendees like, when do you want to get know, you know, if you're going to an event, it's like 2 weeks before you. You go, I have to go to this event. I don't know anybody. How can I, you know, look at the attendee list. I'd like to connect with him, I'd like to connect with her. Well, this online platform they've developed which is around their chatter platform, it's a Facebook like interface. You can go online, start hooking up with people before you ever get there. It's kind of the storming part of the relationship building. Instead of wasting time with that on site, you get that out of the way and once you get there, boom, you're ready to go to the next step of the relationship.

Josh: Right. You can't stress enough how much that ongoing engagement is important, you know, before, during and after the event.

Bill: Exactly.

Josh: The combination and community and events together is just very powerful for the overall, you know, unlocking that hidden wealth of customers that we're talking about here.

Bill: Yeah.

Josh: So, keeping on the topic of events. You host a big event around customer engagement and advocacy. What goes on at these summit on customer engagement? How did that start, and what are companies going to find there?

Bill: Well, what goes on, I had to kill you before I get, if I told you, Josh. Just kidding. It's a blast. We had a lot of fun. You get a conference for advocacy professionals. We get them from all over the world. We do in the bay area, we've been doing it in the bay area for the past few years. We get the top practitioners in the world. These are people that are running customer advocacy and engagement programs. They are at great companies like Intel and Salesforce.com and Wells Fargo Bay and Oracle, Microsoft. This year, we're going to have, one of our key noters, I'll give you an early heads up, senior vice president for an $11 billion division in the health care services company, AmerisourceBergen, is going to be key noting about how customer advocacy built that business. We've also got another key noter that I can't tell you about, but I'll just say stay tune for the one. So we got great practitioners. We got great companies.

We've also got a very good group of sponsors. Some of them have been in this space for years. They're very credible. They're very well respected. Then we have some of the newer ones who are bringing technology solutions. I think I mentioned earlier the gamification platform has been developed by a company called Influitive, that's doing extremely well. It's kinda, they're getting great clients and they're providing a really valuable solution to enticing advocates into the advocacy efforts. We've got another firm, TechValidate, creates automated customer content and does incredible things with this. That bypass the usual success story process, lengthy and far with legal parts and all these stuffs. And then there's a new one, new company called Zuberance. It allows your promoters, people who say they would be likely to promote you on surveys to promote right there and there. As soon as they say “yeah, I'd be likely to recommend to a colleague or friend”. Boom. You can do it right here. There's a box to fill in. You know, they guide them through that process. Then it populates immediately to their social media outlet of choice. In Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. So that's going to be there. We've got the best practitioners, great companies, the top vendors and suppliers in this area.

Another thing we do is we keep of ration of practitioners to vendors very high. Generally by 3 to 1. So that you're not sitting there, feeling like you're surrounded by vendors. You have just enough vendors there to give you perspective and idea of what the solutions are out there. And they also, and they become very good at this. They signed an agreement. No sales, no pressure. You're there to help and contribute knowledge and your expertise. You're not there to store anybody anything. And they're taking it to such an extreme. It's like I'm going, you know, this is great. So that's what goes on there.

Josh: It sounds like a great event. I actually followed it last year on, actually the past couple of years on Twitter as it was happening and some of the insights coming out of it is very helpful. Things that people can, you know, put into practice pretty quickly.

Bill: Thank you. We also had a lot of fun too. We've got some wild sponsors who host things like we've had go cart races, we've had, you know, when you ask me what goes on there, this is probably, some of the stuff I probably can't talk about. I'm kidding. But it's a lot of fun and then they come back the next, leave on the first night and then they come back with some great stories to tell. So we had a lot of fun too.

Josh: It's also underscores how much this community, how tight knit the community is and how much they trust each other and really look forward. It's not just a chance to get away from their office. It's, you know, these people really valued their relationships that they have built.

Bill: Hugely. Relationships and the knowledge they gain. They stay in touch with each other afterward. So yeah. It's, we have a great time and I think it is a valuable event.

Josh: Wonderful. What I want to ask you about now is the value proposition that companies can create to help entice customers to partner with them to grow their business. And that, some, you know, we talked about this concept being foreign to a lot of companies. What are the components of a value proposition that would get customers to help you grow your business? It seems intimidating to me on some levels.

Bill: How so?

Josh: In that, you know, maybe it's an old school marketing approach. Where there's a marketing funnel and the customer converts at the top and then converts at the middle and then converts at the bottom or their prospect converts. Asking, you know, I come from a model or a background where we serve the customer. We serve our customers. So asking our customers to help us is difficult on some levels.

Bill: You know what, that's a great point. That has a great point and you're right. It's like asking a favor. It seems that way, and there's an approach that first of all, people coming from that approach sometimes laps and we got to give them a reward. We have to give cash prizes or we have to give them discounts, or, you know, we're asking these favors. We got to give elaborate gifts or something. And I would caution you about that. Would you want your friend or your colleague to refer you to a company because they gave you a gift or they gave you a leather jacket or something or who knows what. And no, you wouldn't. It destroys the integrity of the process.

A way to think about getting customers to advocate for you is to think in terms of an expanded value proposition. And here's how it looks. First off, price of admission. You do a great job for the customer. That's a given. And if you're not doing that, then fix it. Then once you are doing a great job and you're getting better, you know, let's say you're doing a quarterly review or discussion wherein you keep, you know, notes that, I'll say it's a technology solution. No technology solution goes perfectly from the get go, it takes a while. But the customer tries, they're doing really good and they're fixing the problems as they go on. So that's a given. You got to do that.

Then once you do that to entice this customer to reference and to tell the story that she has that she can tell which is a good one, focus on helping her build her social capital. That's what advocates, what I call your rock stars or SAS calls it's MVPs or what SAP calls customer champions. Whatever name you use, they want to build their social capital. And that means expanding their network and their opportunities to affiliate. It means improving, helping them improving their reputation, and then it also, you know, status, give them status, give them recognition. And then also, third is giving them access to knowledge that they've done. Those 3 things.

For example. Let's take one of the companies that I've talked about. Let's take SAS Canada, their customer retention problem. What got those champions do all these, those customer champions, doing all those things to get the word out about, you know, SAS Canada, yeah, their software is still solving or their keeping up with their problems, they're doing a great job. You shouldn't defect. What go them to do that? Well, these customer champions receive recognition. They receive leadership positions in this executive committee. They were front and center at these forums, these live forums they put all around the country. They receive designation, these customer champions, They get interviewed at SAS's customer events as if they were, and they are, very important people. So that's how doing effect get customers to promote you. It's by making it as an exercise in building their social capital.

So part of the relationship building and the value proposition expansion process, is to find out from your individual customer etiquette how they would like to build their social capital. And, you know, you don't have to phrase it that way. They even don't know what that even means. But find out if they're interested in speaking. Find out if they're interested in greater affiliation. If they'd like to get to know more people like them in your community. Find out if they're interested, if there's knowledge or information that you could provide them. And chances are your company has a lot of expert knowledge within the bounds of the company. And it's not coming from your marketing department, it's coming from your experts. Your process and your technology experts. Find out if they have knowledge that your customers would value. So you could get a sense of what they would value and you craft a customer advocacy process for those customers that helps them build their social capital in ways that they find compelling.

Josh: I think that makes a lot of sense. I'm sold and much more comfortable in the process just from hearing those 3 or 4 steps in the process, to move this forward. What are some of the common challenges or pitfalls that an organization might encounter when transitioning to a strategy like this?

Bill: Well, there's, probably the main one, there are several. But the main one is the traditional approach to marketing, that gets ingrain that your planning and your strategy and your budgeting process. And when you boil it down, the way marketing often looks like, what it often looks like in a company is all right. We go this product launch. You know. We got to decide how much to put in the PR, how much to put in to advertising, how much to put in the more comps, how much should we put in the dimension and, you know, these very sprockets. And then we'll try this mix and see how it does and well, it's not quite getting us the growth we want so let's just call somebody over here. And then customer advocacy tends to get put into one of those buckets. That's not going to work. And I think the wise start successfully is to designate somebody, a powerful executive to be directly involved in them. Some powerful executive who's passionate about this and I think one who understand the value of advocacy. Put them in charge of this. And then have groups, they have a group of people they can cultivate these advocacy relationships. If you leave it up in sale, for the counter ups, bless their hearts. They are great at developing, well, some of them are great in developing relationships, but they just tend to kind of go away once the deal is signed and the customer seems happy. And you need somebody to cultivate the advocacy side of that relationship. So I'd say those 2 things. You can also start small. You don't have to boil the ocean to do this company wide. Find a market, find a product line that's important and just start with that. Just start cultivating advocates there, put this organization together as I have described, and start racking up some success and proofs of concepts for it, and then build it up.

Josh: Have you seen some overlap between the role of kind of the person who champions in advocacy program and cultivates those relationships and a community manager?

Bill: Yeah, sure. There better be. There better be integration between those groups because what you, you don't want to get into a situation with your advocacy program like you do with your overall product organization or, you know, customer buys a product or a service, and whenever they have a problem, they don't know who to talk to, they could push off to people, different people handle different aspects doing it and they can't get a straight answer from a single person. You don't want to replicate that over with your advocacy efforts. And advocacy includes communities, it includes referrals, it includes advisory boards, your reference programs, and so forth. All of those are part of your, you want to present a total advocacy picture to your customer. We had a very dynamic dream customer from any technology firm. Her name is Penny Morrison. She's now chief information officer at Cardinal Healthcare and she's been the CIO at Motorola, and Office Depot and one of the GE businesses. She's successfully dynamic. And she complained about it. You know, I had her at one of our advance, you know the fire side chin and she talked about this. You know, don't you show off when you need a reference request, you know, from somebody over here and somebody else is coming at me about the advisory board meeting or seeking advice for the (?) we can sit on. Give her a holistic view of what the reference in advocacy, what the advocacy possibilities are that you can provide. Design a holistic advocacy value proposition and activities for her. And she lined what it would be for her in particular and it's going to different for everybody. So you want one person that the organization can provide that. Does that makes sense?

Josh: It does. It does. And, you know, that approach, you know, say a good approach for a lot of different programs. And what I'm hearing is that you don't want your advocacy program to go to a direction that's not aligned with other programs and strategic initiatives within the organization. You don't want it to become an outlier...

Bill: Right.

Josh: But at the same time, a lot of times, this is a pretty progressive program within the organization. So you need that stake holder who can keep everybody on board.

Bill: Yeah.

Josh: So we've talked about kind of the strategy and some approaches and the way to overcome some of the hurdles that someone might run into. Walk me through how an organization might measure the "return on relationship". Is it through the, you know, traditional, you know, leads, opportunities, sales, measurement or are there specific measures that people need to bone up on?

Bill: Well, that can be one. Though, if you got a reference or an advocate or a referral source, it obviously will depend on what they can do. But let's say you have, I've got in my board, I've got this composite customer advocate, a rock star that I call Kathy[SP], who is kind of a compositive, the kinds of advocates you see in these companies. And she has a blog. She's got a good following. She's active in a couple of social networks. She wants to speak. She's in a very interesting professional association. So as you tailor activities to her and with her, you might give her material for her blog, you might give her a speaking opportunity in one of your conferences, you might partner to speak with her at her professional association. So in all these activities, obvious, he want to be set up to be able to say okay, you know, like for example, if you do a webinar together or you do a speech, you want people there to, and give them an opportunity in your audience to follow up. You know, here's a landing page to go to. Here's where you can go for further information, and so forth. So you can get start to get an idea of what kind of leads were generated and track them and see how many deals you closed. And then you have to use your judgment. In some cases, the lead will be all due to her credit. In some areas, she's played a part but there are other factors as well. So you give her a score and so forth. So that's a fairly straight forward process. Then another situation is that she's providing referrals again. There's 2 kinds of referrals for measurement purposes. One is a referral that comes to you and would have otherwise known about you and you can ask them this. And so she'd get full credit for that. Another one of your referral is oh yeah, I've been meaning to check you out. I was probably going to do it anyway but this has prompted me to do it soon.

So it would be a bit of a difference for it. So you try to score these pretty carefully and you score her contribution to that laid in a way that reflects, you want to give it more credit than deserves but you want to make sure you get a sense of the value that she's granted. And then there's other things like sales productivity. For example, one of my advisory board members who I cannot name. I can only, I like this story and honestly that she has developed tremendous information about how having a reference, just a reference program for your sales people, how much it improves their productivity. Sales people in some companies spent a lot of hours looking for that reference you talked about earlier to close that deal. Spend 5 to 7 hours in some cases. Well, if you start putting that back into their time banks so to speak, later you won't have to waste your time doing it, that makes your productivity shoot up. So that's another measure that you can do.

Josh: All right. We have had, we have a large software company customer that uses an online customer community to manage just their thousands and thousands of customer references. Keeping them engaged, keeping them informed, and keeping them accessible to the sales team and people who need them in the company.

Bill: Yeah. Think about what productivity boost that is. When you're, if it really does work. If it really does, allow that sales person to then go and forget the concierge service. you can go online and find that, you know, find the best possible reference for that deal. That's huge.

Josh: Right. So, if I'm a company. I don't have, you know, a good advocacy program built, pretty traditional B to B company. How can I get started in engaging my customers and creating customer advocates. What are some small steps and some first steps I can take?

Bill: Well, do some triage. Start by saying let's go pick a business where we think there's a lot of potential for advocates. You know, we're not getting the traction we thought we would. It's an important business. It maybe a new line of business. It's strategic. So let's go, let's start over there. And then start looking. We're not that hard to find. Start looking for your best potential advocates. If you're doing net promoter store or at least asking on surveys or asking your customers, the net promoter score question, would you refer us to a colleague or a friend, it's very easy to ask. Well, there' a candidate. They just said they'd do it. So get strategic about the line of business you started with, get strategic about the product that you start with and then start looking for customers that like I say, net promoter or promoters, maybe a marquee brand. Sometime they'll provide some referral reference activity for you. Be sure that you're looking for customers with a great story to tell. Your sales people can tell you this. You know, we implemented, there are new solution you should see what these customers done with it. Are they really knocking down some really great results here? You want to have access to that kind of information. Your sales people need to be giving it to you. Some references, some customers like Patty Morrison. And you see this overlooked a lot. They'll have a huge, you know, what we used to call Rolodex. They have an incredible contact list. And if you've approached her in the right way, she might be willing to open that up to you. So you want to find out who those customers are. And if you'll use the value proposition approach I described earlier, that's how you get them to do so. They want, your customers want you to succeed. Believe it or not, they do if you're doing a good job for them. And to help you succeed, they will provide you those referrals. So find those customers. So again, you know, use those 3 or 4, 5 criteria, find whatever number, whatever size of business you have and how many customers you have. Find a small but effective number that can start moving the meter on sales and do a proof of concept. Figure out what it takes, organizationally, training-wise, what value proposition your customers need, get this all figured out on a small scale. Get the results, then you've got something you can take back to your senior management and say yeah, this is something we can roll out here.

Josh: I think that's some really useful advice. And you know, it's not just theory, it's, you know, here's how to do it. Is there a specific department or individual role within an organization that you see getting this program started more than another department?

Bill: Well, you know. Mostly, I think that existing departments like your existing, say your existing marketing communications department, your social, you know, others, pretty much social media and social departments and groups, have skeptical volumes. I think it needs to be it's... and because, for example, when you have the social media folks taking these programs, they don't know, they're forte, their expertise in the technology, not in the relationship building. And I think that at companies that have experienced building advisory boards and reference programs, that might be a good candidate to take the whole customer advocacy role. Those might be folks to do it because they're the ones with experience building those relationships. So I would put it in part of an existing program like making its own and probably there's a good chance your reference or your advisory board people are those who've had experience building these advocacy relationships are probably the ones you want running it. Plus, the strong senior executive.

Josh: Absolutely. And you make a good point that, you know, these strategies are really most successful when they're strategic and deliberate. You know, people don't fall into or rarely fall into successful customer engagement programs, customer reference programs. You know, you really have to think it through, dedicate the resources and the time and integrate it into your business whole heartedly.

Bill: That's right. And your business strategy, that's absolutely right.

Josh: So you do a lot of speaking and a lot of people listen to what you have to say. So if you were speaking to a room full of business executives, what is the one thing that you'd want them to take away regarding unlocking the value of customers to help you market, sell and create product? What's the one thing you want them to walk out of the room with, on idea.

Bill: Well, looking at your own company, that you forget all these other examples of other companies, all the ideas we've talked about. Look at your own company. How well is your growth engine working? How well is your organic growth engine working? And if you're one of those 75% of CEOs who thinks that your marking just doesn't cut the mushroom, then ask yourself this question. Among all the resources at your disposal, all your employees, all the agencies you work with, all the consulting firms, if you use consultants that you work with, all your partners. Among all your resources, who are the most credible to your buyers, who are most persuasive, who would you buyers be most interested in getting to know and learning from. Those are the key capabilities that you need to grow your company. And the answer to all those questions is among all your resources, it's your customers. So start figuring out today how to get your customers marketing and so on and even developing products for you. That's a take away deal.

Josh: I think that's a really good note to end on. So, Bill Lee, I want to thank you very much for these really tangible tips and approaches today. Thank you for being on the show and I hope we can do this again sometime.

Bill: Sure. I'd loe to, Josh. And thank you. Those are excellent probing questions that you bashed. I don't always get those on these kinds of things and those were really really good. It's been a lot of fun.

Josh: Good, good. I think the people listening to this podcast of watching this video will really get a lot of think about coming out of it. So maybe we can connect again after The Summit on Customer Engagement. That is...

Bill: March 4th through 6th. It's not for several months. March 4th through the 6th in San Francisco at the Sofitel Hotel. And by the day. If I can be of any, if you get people with questions or whatever after this, feel free to forward them along to me. Happy to respond to anything that you...

Josh: Where can people find you on the web?

Bill: There is the Customer Reference Forum site, CustomerReferenceForum.com. And then we have a consulting group that we set up, called Lee Consulting Group, that to help people do some of the things we've talked about and that's at Lee-consulting-group.com.

Josh: Great.

Bill: And you also get information of course about my book which was just published a couple of months ago. So it's still pretty out off the presses. You can get information there as well.

Josh: It is a great book. It's called “The Hidden Wealth of Customers”. And as always, you can find the episodes, other episodes of ProCommunity at Socious.com. You can also subscribe to the show as an audio podcast in iTunes where we try to publish weekly. Also 5 star ratings and good reviews are appreciated if you like what you've heard today. Bill, I want to thank you once again and have a great day.

Bill: Great. Thanks, Josh. It's been great.

ProCommunity #6: Customer Communities, Customer Engagement, and Customer Advocacy

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 11:50:00 GMT

Discussing How to Create Customer Advocates with Bill Lee

Bill Lee joins us for this episode of ProCommunity, the show where online communities meet business performance.

Bill is the founder of the Customer Reference Forum, a group dedicated helping companies enlist customers to help them market and sell. Each year the Customer Reference Forum also runs the Summit of Customer Engagement to bring customer reference and engagement professionals together. He is also the author of the new book, The Hidden Wealth of Customers. Bill can be found at blog.customerreferenceforum.com.

The Customer Engagement Topics That We Chatted About:

Why is the traditional model of growing businesses dying?
The untapped value that existing customers can create
How SAS Canada “Customer Champions” restored declining customer retention rates
With customer engagement, what kinds of tangible benefits can companies expect to see?
The role of online customer communities in both managing customer relationships and unlocking additional value for companies
How Salesforce.com ‘customer sales people’ achieved, in effect, 80% close rates
The Summit on Customer Engagement
The components of a value proposition that entices customers to partner with you to grow your business
Common pitfalls and challenges of customer reference and engagement programs
How to measure "return on relationship"

Tips for Managing Your User Community From an Oracle User Group [Transcript]

Mon, 13 Aug 2012 13:07:00 GMT

In episode #5 of Socious’ podcast, ProCommunity, I spoke with Lew Conner, Executive Director at The Higher Education User Group. We discussed how to keep customers engaged by creating a win/win partnership with your user community.

The conversation also included the importance of user groups to customers and companies, common elements of a successful user community, and popular online community software features for user groups.

ProCommunity #5 Transcript: Growing and Managing User Group Communities

Josh: Welcome to episode number five of ProCommunity, the show where online community meets business performance. I'm Josh Paul, and you can see all of the Pro-community episodes at Socious.com, you can also subscribe to the show as an audio podcast on iTunes. I'm very excited to have with me today, Lew Conner, a veteran of the customer community world. He is currently the executive director of the Higher Education User Group, a large independent user group of customers using Oracle and People Soft higher education product. Welcome, Lew.

Lew: Thanks, Josh.

Josh: So I wanted to speak with you specifically, because you not only run a very successful user group, and have seen significant growth in that user group over the past several years, but I also wanted to talk to you because you've been involved in customer engagement for decades. How did you get involved in user communities?

Lew: Well, when I look back now it has been nearly 30 years since the first time, or maybe 25 years. Essentially back in the late '80's I was a university registrar; and in those days there was a company known as Information Associates, IA Software. They essentially did student systems for higher education. As a registrar, my grades, admissions, financial aid were all done using the Information Associates software. And I became a member of one of their student records advisory group, and through that also became a board member of a group that was called SISU, Student Information Systems Users, which is very similar to the group that I'm involved with right now as executive director.

Josh: OK. So people hear about user groups all the time, but on their face people don't know that there are two different kinds of user groups. There are independent user groups and that's where a lot of your background stems from, and there are company run user groups. Can you tell the folks listening this or watching this video some of the differences between the two?

Lew: Yeah. I think from an independent standpoint one of the things that sometimes you tend to get are the members feel, because they're independent they can offer a little more candor to the company. They feel like they can speak their mind very freely, because of the independency. There's few conflict of interest issues when the members themselves are paying for everything, or their universities are, and they don't have to rely on the vendor for direct funding or financial resources. From a company side the independent user group, I think it's a benefit to them, in many cases because when they're up against in a cell cycle, other companies that they're competing against that don't have the independent group and sometimes I think they use that. I know Oracle does, they'll use that to say that “our groups are independent and we're willing to work with them and they're willing to work with us.” The dependent group side, definitely there's a lower cost to the user group member with that, because there's some financial resources coming to the company. I think that you get a little more of a predefined executive buy-in from the group, from the company. Which kind of in turn means that you might have a little bit more access as a user group to some of the company executives. As an independent group we have to fight pretty hard to be sure that we have the right message, and that we get the right players from a company to the table. Once you establish the fact that you're a credible group and your input and advocacy to the company is helpful, it's not a major problem for the group to get the company execs. But I think that at the start the dependent group has better access to begin with.

Josh: OK. So it sounds like a company run dependent user group, sometimes comes with some baggage as well. Where the customer's not only interacting with the company through the user group, but they also have customer service tickets hanging out there and they're also receiving marketing messages. Whereas the independent user group really has a more streamlines mission and the communication can be more focused.

Lew: Yeah. I think the point of that is that the independent user group establishes what their goals and missions are. The dependent group, the company establishes that. So with some buy in and with some interaction with the members, but I can honestly say when we sat down and created this group, now 15, 16 years ago, with People Soft, People Soft really wasn't at the table to determine what was going to be happening as far as the mission and the goals of the group.

Josh: OK. And really it probably goes back, at least in my experience, it goes back to what works best for the organization and their customers. Sounds like both independent and dependent, or company run user groups have advantages and disadvantages and it really depends on where the company is in their growth and the types of engagement they want to have with the user community.

Lew: Yeah. And I would agree, it kind of depends on the industry too. Quite honestly, while we are a group independent of Oracle, Oracle has its own customer groups internally as well. So they have a few of their own user groups. Most of the people who sit on those are also our members. So you're going to see kind of a mix of both that will happen out there for most companies that are out there.

Josh: Well that's interesting that there's that cross-pollination of ideas and advocacy.

Lew: Right.

Josh: So let's back up for a second and just talk about the importance of a strong user group or a strong user community, both to customers and to the company itself. What are some of the benefits that both groups see from having a strong user community?

Lew: Well I think from a user standpoint, our organization has two primary purposes, it's education and advocacy. So if we can work with the company to fulfill those purposes for our members, then that's perfect. It allows us that opportunity to speak what's on our minds, to tell the company what the members feel like they need. In turn, the benefit to the company is they get fresh ideas, fresh product, they have a resource they can turn to basically at any given point and time. Now that we're global it's pretty much 24/7 that a representative could contact anybody from our organization for input. So the company benefits from that as well as the membership. The other side of it ends up being from an education standpoint, that's the advocacy side, the education standpoint, the members are able to train each other but they also receive benefits like at conferences, region conferences, webinars, where the company will come in and do some of the training and webinars, just some of the education is done by the company and by the member. So I think that's a benefit to both the company, being able to promote the product without doing it in such a sales-y way and to the membership to receive more real time information from the company. So from advocacy and education those are two primary things that help both sides.

Josh: From the users or customers perspective, is there a support element in there? Where if somebody is struggling to solve a problem in their jobs, can they reach out to the community and get a pretty quick response?

Lew: Yeah, absolutely. And that's the whole basis of the HEUG community site. We have the form that's are our primary area that we utilize to help each other. The networking, the education side of things, where we put out, and I haven't really looking at it in the last year, but almost a year ago the HEUG itself puts out over seven million emails during, I believe, it's in a one month period of time. We have 16 different product areas, communities, within the group, and at any given point in time there will be 4,000 to 5,000 different members subscribed to these different groups. So when one email goes out asking, “How do I do this type of thing on my implementation, I'm struggling”, you get an immediate response, generally, anywhere from a dozen to two dozen people will offer input right away. So, yes, the forms definitely there's all sorts of opportunities. Not only to be reactive and ask a question but when people are implementing and they come across things that are really slick, they are more than willing to get out there and share a little code; and share their ideas with the rest of the community.

Josh: The Higher Education User Groups online community is known as one of the most active and valuable software user group communities out there. What do you think the secret to your success is?

Lew: Well it's really culture. The higher education culture is that there is very little competitiveness when you're off the athletic field and when you're not competing against each other for grants and research. When you get beyond that, sometimes there is some competitiveness from the admissions standpoint but the reality is once you're beyond those areas, they share everything. Not only internally within our organization sharing how to do things, but if there's another vendor or any vendor out there and somebody's looking to procure software, they will certainly pick up the phone and ask questions of each other without any prompting whatsoever. So it's a culture of collaboration. And that really works very well with this industry and some of the commercial industries, some of them it will work very well, in others where it's highly competitive it's hard for me to see that the CIO of General Motors might sit down with the CIO of Toyota and work together on how they can make things better. There's too much competitive market there. Nut, again, in some cases it does work very well. Higher ed, it's a collaborative culture, that's really what does it.

Josh: That makes a lot of sense. You mentioned the forums and online groups and listservs in your online community were really the most popular features. Were there any other features that are being used heavily in your online community? And which are the most important?

Lew: I think two others jump out right away. One is targeted emails. If we as an organization have information we want to get out to the membership, we're able to do that either through the forums or using the targeted email engine, and get a template that's consistent and a message that's consistent out to all the membership; and focus only on those areas within the community that want to hear the message. So we don't have to send it out to our 22,000 members all at one, occasionally we do that, but we can focus on the 3,000 or 4,000 members that are interested in the contributor relations product or the 10,000 members that might span all of the campus community, which is the student system products. So the targeted email is one. I think the webinars that we've been doing is another. Being able to have an education series page and community there. Where people can get free access to webinars and learn and get a lot of information and training that's done through those areas.

Josh: So what I'm hearing is really providing value, providing helpful information, not marketing information is important as well as providing this information in a way where you segment it so you keep the value of your online community and your user group high because you're segmenting the information and only giving people information that's relevant to them. And that's a way to keep people engaged and keep them from tuning you out.

Lew: Right. Rather than do a blanket shotgun approach where you message everybody, this allows us probably to send a lot more messages out but they're sent to specific groups of the population. It isn't like that we do 20 a day or anything, more like 20 a month that will go to different groups. Then there's some, when we're starting to deal with the alliance conference, our event annually or our region conferences, well regional conferences can go to the targeted area but alliance conference will go globally to everybody, so they know what's going on. So the targeted emails are a really strong tool.

Josh: That's good. I've always found that the way you can target and segment groups and emails has been pretty important to both companies and customers. So who in a company does a user group interact with the most? So who at Oracle, not who specifically, but which groups have the most contact with user groups typically?

Lew: Well the approach that the HEUG Takes, I don't know if I explained this, the Higher Education User Group we pronounce it 'hug' that's our acronym, the HEUG takes is to try and engage at various levels. We look at things both strategically and tactically so if you're looking on a day to day business standpoint something that's tactical where a financial aid clerk is trying to input something and it's just not working, there's a tactical way of dealing with that. Most of that will go through our project advisory groups so we have 16 different project advisory groups that a strategist from Oracle sits on these groups. So there are anywhere from six to nine members that are on these groups and so tactical issues will go to that group so they can work out. A lot of times that clerk is just doing something wrong and then it goes to form, they come back with a response and it's taken care of. Other times it could be a product enhancement that needs to be done, or a bug in the software. And that can go from a tactical standpoint to those product strategist from Oracle that are on the group. Sometimes the strategists do engage at a strategic level as well. They'll do the tactical side, but when they're looking at what does higher ed need for product three to five years out, they'll start to ask some of these targeted groups, product advisory groups, what do you think, what do you need three to five years from now so they'll engage, at that level, both from a strategy and tactical side.

Josh: That information sound invaluable to Oracle. I mean to have access to that feedback in a consistent fashion.

Lew: Yeah, it really is a two way street. The good news about Oracle is they definitely listen and they come to the table and they have strategists there and the strategists are on the forums as well. They engage with the six to nine member product advisory group, but they're also out there with the 4,000 people on the forum and if they can offer input they can solve some issues as well. So it's beneficial for the members but it's a goldmine from Oracle's standpoint as far as the feedback they get. The other area that we engage in when we're trying to do multiple areas is the board of directors of the HEUG engages more at the executive level with Oracle. So we just came off of our summer board meeting and we had Paco Aubrejuan and Cliff Godwin, which are two senior vice presidents for Oracle, who were in the room and spent the afternoon with us, it was a round table, they were there as well as a couple of other people, Gretchen Alarcon and Mark Armstrong, two other vice presidents; and it was just a discussion. No power-points involved, it was a discussion with the board, they were able to ask us questions, we were able to offer them opinions, seek direction on where the company is headed in different areas. So at an executive level the board with engage a lot higher. So it's multiple faceted to try and engage with them. And Oracle does a really good job coming to the table when we ask.

Josh: That's great. It sounds like a real win/win.

Lew: Yeah. It has, from our standpoint, it has

Josh: So you've seen a lot of user groups over the years, Oracle, People Soft, and several other software solutions. What are some of the common components of a successful user group, both structurally, you said there's a board, there's engagement at the executive level, there's tactical stuff, and then also activity wise. What type of activities, events, education series, what do you recommend the companies look into?

Lew: I think you're right, there's a variety of different things. And it all goes back to what services you're going to provide your members. The HEUG itself, there was no charge up until about three years ago to be a member of the HEUG, so all of our members if you bought an Oracle application software in higher ed then you automatically were eligible to become a member, and you got all the benefits of the forms, all the networking. We switched to a model just a few years ago that does offer paid membership and it was taken up by nearly 90% of our membership just immediately. So we had been providing value for a number of years already. But since then we start to think we're charging member services now so we want to make sure that we're going a good job of providing services to the members. So we focus on a variety of areas, education, again, going back to education advocacy as the two primary missions. Making sure we provide valuable conferences to the members. We've had the alliance conference for 15 years, and we have about 4,000 attendees at that conference that come from, I believe this year it was 33 countries from around the world. We do a very, very good job of providing content and opportunities for networking amongst the members. So, I think that's one of the key components, making sure you have an event that you can get people face to face because as much online traffic that we do, it's extremely important to be sure that you still meet face to face at some point in time. We've also expanded that to regional groups; so we do now 10 regional events this year. Six in the United States and three in other part of the world. We'll have one in London, we've done for six years, one in Australia, and now this year we're going to have another one in Hong Kong. So making sure that you have events for your international members as well as regional events for those members who wouldn't be able to make it to the larger alliance conference, the larger national event. So I think that's a key component of success. Being sure that something is set up from an advocacy standpoint, and being sure that you have power members, and power users, if you're a user group that are really responsible for those areas.

So in our case there's a variety of different products that Oracle sells from application standpoint, whether it's financials or human resource or student system. We have experts and advocates that really champion these different areas that are members, and making sure that you have somebody that steps up to do that is very critical. So that you don't say that you have a pillar structure or an advisory group category and there's nobody really there promoting it. You have to have somebody out there putting content out onto the forms, making sure that there's something compelling for people to listen to and to seek help with. So the advocacy side and then networking, being sure you set up opportunities for people to network, whether it's online or at the various conferences. Even going beyond your own conferences, there are times that we engage with some of our peer user groups from Oracle. We will go to their conferences, we'll go to the ODTUG, Oracle Developer Tools User Group, because there's some overlap with some of our developers that are going to be there. So we'll make sure that we're in some of those groups as well. So providing again, the valuable content, making sure that there's a champion that's involved, be sure there's a lot of networking opportunities as well. All of those are really critical to making sure it all works. Organizationally, you can have a variety of different structures as far as who's going to govern the organization, who's going to make sure that they buy into the process and the organization.

Josh: I think that one of the things you touched on is the importance of the online community, and one of the things that fuels a successful online community is that content plan. That educational, helpful content being pumped into the community consistently, every day, every other day. I can't stress that enough.

Lew: Yeah. That's critical. Really for our group, because we're so collaborative, it didn't take a long time for that to happen. But once it happens it snowballs, and it's such a powerful tool that in our case, these product advisory groups I mentioned earlier, the six to nine members, those are the champions. Those are the people that are out there putting content out there and responding to information within 24 hours. And that's just critical. Once you get that established and people see that it's worthwhile and there's value to going to it, then they go.

Josh: That's impressive. So what are some of the biggest challenges of managing a large user group?

Lew: Right now one of the challenges that we're having is making sure, we have a large number of people who would like to volunteer. We need to create opportunities for people to volunteer, to be able to get out, we have nearly 200 people that are engaged for those product advisory groups, that's very specific. We go beyond that and then the opportunities for involvement diminish to a degree. And so trying to think out of the box and trying to create areas that can be beneficial to the members and offer services to the members and create opportunities for the volunteers as well. I think that's one of my biggest challenges right now, making sure there's enough work for everybody to do. There certainly is, but there's a lot of interest. As I said we had 22,000 members online; so there's a lot of people that want to engage and want to be involved.

Josh: That's a good problem to have. But it's a credit to the value that you've been providing for years and years and years.

Lew: I definitely think so. The other thing that, this isn't necessarily a challenge, but it's one of those things that you really have to put your finger on and make sure it continues to work. That's being sure that the executive sponsors from the membership community remain engaged. Right now we do have an executive group that we do an executive forum every year, we have an executive group that offers input as well. Being sure that those executives, who normally aren't going to get out of the office to go to our conference know why their staff are going and know the value of it. So that sometimes is a challenge, because they are such busy individuals on their campus.

Josh: That's a good point. And that's one of those hidden gems that comes out of conversations like this. That people can really take away to make sure that that's shored up on their campus. So, a couple more questions. What advice do you have for companies and independent user groups for starting or strengthening their user group? What are some small steps that they can take?

Lew: It still goes back to being sure you find the right individuals who understand the big picture. One of the things when you have the candid advocate sometimes their focus is very narrow minded on their own campus or their individual situation. Being sure that the company or the members that are starting this out go beyond any type of bickering with the company and try to come up with a partnership. Making sure they have a broad sense of how this works for all of the member and not just their own situation. I think that's one of the first steps, is identifying that team of people that can do that. We're doing that a lot globally. I mean we've been around for 16 years as an organization, the last four or five we've started to expand globally. So we're creating those types of communities and organizing committees in what we call middle Europe, Middle East and Africa, in Latin American and Brazil now, in Asia now; and being sure that we get the right people that are going to be able to take this and move it along with the broad picture in place. I think that's what's critical. Then just making sure that there are consistent opportunities to engage as a board of directors we meet on a conference call once a month but each of the board members also has a product advisory call that they're on. So generally once a week there is some call that people have to be on that they're trying to be engaged in. And it's not like a four hour call, it's a 30 minute call, maybe an hour call every week. Making sure that kind of commitment is there all the way through.

Josh: I think that's important. Those are some really tangible tips. So if you're speaking to a room full of company executives, on the importance of a strong user community and engaging their user community, whether it's a company user group or an independent user group. What is the one takeaway that you would want them to come out of the room with, regarding the importance of engaging their user community?

Lew: I think I would want them to come out with the idea that a partnership can be formed with the members. A partnership that can be very candid and if they can allow an atmosphere and allow the climate for the user group to be able to speak their mind, not in the public forum, but be able to speak their mind candidly and appropriately. Then the value from the advice and the advocacy that they get is phenomenal. It just goes far and in so many different ways.

Josh: I couldn't agree with you more from my experience. Lew, I want to thank you for sharing your insight and experience today. I hope we can do this again someday.

Lew: Very welcome. I appreciate the opportunity.

Josh: And before we go, where can people find you on the web?

Lew: The best way for me, is if you go to HEUG online, it's www.heug.org, there will be information that is there. We do have a public and a private site so there's a lot of public information that is out there. If you click on the link to the current board of directors, my information is there. Otherwise lconner at heug.org is my email address, feel free to contact me there.

Josh: Great. I think in this conversation you brought up a lot of good things for both companies and for customers to think about, in terms of getting involved in their user group or starting a user group. And you got in some tangible, you got into the trenches some; with some really valuable information. So as always you can find all of the ProCommunity episodes at Socious.com. You can also subscribe to the show in an audio podcast format on iTunes, where five star rating and positive reviews are appreciated if you like what you heard today. Lew, I want to thank you once again, and have a great day.

Lew: Thanks Josh. You're very welcome.

ProCommunity #5: User Groups, Online Forums, and Customer Engagement

Tue, 07 Aug 2012 11:17:00 GMT

Discussing How User Groups Increase Customer Engagement with Lew Conner

Lew Conner joins us for this episode of ProCommunity, the show where online communities meet business performance.

Lew is the Executive Director of the Higher Education Users Group (HEUG), a large independent user group serving Oracle and PeopleSoft customers across the globe. He has been involved in leading and managing software user communities for over 30 years. Lew can be found at www.HEUG.org.

The User Group Management Topics That We Chatted About:

The difference between independent and company-run user groups
The importance of user groups to customers and companies
Which company representatives do user groups interact with most?
Common components of successful user groups
The biggest challenges of managing a large user community
The impact of online communities on user groups
Popular online community software features for user groups
How to start or strengthen a user group

The Role of Online Customer Communities in Product Management [Transcript]

Mon, 06 Aug 2012 12:11:00 GMT

In episode #4 of Socious’ podcast, ProCommunity, I spoke with Steve Johnson, Chief Marketing Officer at Primary Intelligence. We discussed the state of product management and how companies are using online customer communities to innovate products and services.

The conversation also included why businesses should care about product management more than they do, the importance of win/loss analysis, and how to get started listening to your customer community.

ProCommunity #4 Transcript: Listening to Your Customer Community to Improve Products

Josh: Welcome to Episode 4 of ProCommunity, the show where online community meets business performance. I'm Josh Paul. You can see all of the episodes of ProCommunity on Socious.com. You can also subscribe to this show as an audio podcast on iTunes. I'm very pleased to have with me today Steve Johnson, Chief Marketing Officer at Primary Intelligence, a company dedicated to using primary sourced market data to optimize sales marketing and product strategies. Welcome, Steve.

Steve: Thank you. Good introduction.

Josh: Prior to joining Primary Intelligence, you spent a number of years training product managers and executives, probably thousands of them, on how to align their companies with what the market really wants. It seems that we can't have a conversation about how to use online customer communities and social channels to improve your product management strategy without first talking about product management and what it is and why companies should care.

Steve: Good question. Well, golly. My first job as a product manager is typical

I think of most people's first jobs and that is, "Hey, you're the product manager, whatever that means. Go do product management stuff." And so you go to where the fires are and sales people are screaming they need a new demo and marketing says gosh, we need some content and then now with Agile, we've got developers saying, "Hey, come sit next to me every day, all day, and answer my questions in real time."

And so we've got a lot of different people defining what product management is, and the folks are Pragmatic Marketing get a really good job of saying here's this framework of 37 different activities we find product managers involved in, from the strategic to the tactical. And you can learn more about that at the Pragmatic Marketing website.

And for the last 15 years, I've been working with Pragmatic Marketing and working with product teams, and helping them refine what the role of product management is and there are some organizations, the role is quite strategic. It's the business side of the product. And in other companies, it's much more tactical if you will. And one thing I have seen in particular is the closer you get to California, the more product management is imbedded with the product development team. And the closer you get to Boston, the more likely the product managers are aligned more closely with sales and marketing...

Josh: That's interesting. The geographic trend of [product] management.

Steve: I think it maybe, age of the industry or something. That the firms back East are more traditional, if you will. And the firms out West are younger, well, certainly more focused on building great products as opposed to back East where I live. It's more about, it's not that the products aren't great but it's more about enabling and empowering the sales teams and the marketing teams.

Josh: I've always thought of product management as the best kept secret in business. It's really that product management and your product strategy will have more impact on your business's success or your organization's success than sales and marketing and development combined.

Steve: I think there's some truth to that. It certainly is a best kept secret as you've said. But you know what, what I've been seeing lately is a pretty subtle but really relevant shift. And that product management is now more about refining ideas rather than creating them. In many organizations, I guess you go backwards in time, right, to the 1940's when Proctor and Gamble invented brand management. They said, "Okay. The product manager or the brand manager is the CEO of the product." And we tried to adapt that idea here in technology businesses. That's a good metaphor, product managers, CEO of the product. And I found in real life it's more like the CEO is still the CEO of the product or maybe there's a VP of strategy of VP of product or a CTO who is really the CEO.

But product management's job is then to convert the idea into action, by trying to build feature X or product X. "Hey, product manager. Can you find some research that supports that decision?" Are we just smoking around brochures here or we really on to something. And so go look in Hoovers and go look in LinkedIn and go look in, check with Gartner and go talk to the folks at Forrester and get some information to validate the decision that we've made, rather than product management being the big idea guy. It's the guy who converts the idea into action.

Josh: Is that a healthy trend? Is that.

Steve: I think it is. I think if nothing else, it should be, less frustrating, I guess, for the product managers. I think it's so often the product managers look at this job particularly looking at the Pragmatic Marketing framework and they go "Holy moly, this thing is huge." And yet, if you, I think if you give yourself the freedom to say my job is to refine, my job is to support, my job is to analyze more after the fact. It's a less daunting task to check on product management. And so, I think the traditional view is we start with strategy and go to tactics. And the last few months is I've been talking with product managers and product leaders around the world. I've found an inclination to the other way that says, let's look at the tactics and reverse engineer the strategy. Let's look at what's working and do more of that and let's look at what's not working and do less of that.

Josh: I think that's a good way to look at any element of an organization.

Steve: And that's what Eric Ries is talking about in the Lean Startup. He's like we have this grand vision of building this thing that was a unifier of all of your social networks and then the customer said, "You know what, that's not really what we want but we really love this thing over here."

And so based on market reality, based on their minimum viable product, they said, "Well, let's rethink our strategy."

Josh: That makes a lot of sense. And in the, so one of the most widely talked about examples of product management is Apple. When you think about Apple, you don't think of sales, you don't think of marketing. You think of great products. And, but many organizations miss the take away from Apple's products success. They saw or read about, or read about Steve Jobs and think, I need to, we need to identify that brilliant person to make all the decisions and make our products successful. But that's, that misses the mark a lot of times because not everybody, first of all, not everybody has a Steve Jobs.

Second of all, there are a lot of things that Apple does in terms of listening to their community that you don't read about. They've kind of pulled a great switch on people and great switch on the business community where they, it's a competitor advantage. You don't have a Steve Jobs, so you're not going to be as good us when in fact they use a lot of processes that other organizations can implement. So what are some of the realities and lessons from Apple's product success?

Steve: Good point. Well, in fact, that supports the last point as well, doesn't it. The CEO of the product was the CEO. And Steve Jobs had a vision about what products he wanted to buy and what his teams wanted to buy and certainly, if you have read his books, I mean he was pretty firm about what he believed, but then he had this incredible team. Tim Cook, understanding the operations side and a brilliant designer, and Jonathan Ive, and great product marketing people and great organization around him that turned the big idea in the feasibility.

And a friend recent-, I don't know how recent, a few months ago. A friend of mine bought a Mac Book Air at the Apple Store and she shopped and she picked and whatever and she went back and got her machine and brought it out and made sure she got Apple Care and all that stuff. And then he said, the sales rep said, "Can you wait just a moment? I'd like you to meet somebody." And he went in the back and brought out the product manager for the Mac Book Air. And on the spot, he did a win-loss interview. He did we win your business, what decisions did you go through, and she said, I'll tell you. Price was not an issue. The number one thing I was concerned about was weight. I carry all the stuff on my back, right.

And, the second thing was I was going to make this decision 6 months ago but I waited this long because there's no security lock on the Mac Book Air. And I'm doing presentations in public places and I don't want anybody ripping off my Mac Book. And I think it was a real eye opener for the product manager but hey, that's the hidden part of Apple's innovation...not only do they have this brilliant CEO coming up with great ideas, they've also got an incredible team of project managers, project marketing managers, designers, developers, who are turning the big ideas that are like, "Here's a post-it note idea," and turning that into the hundreds and hundreds of feasibility exercises, the details to make it come true.

Josh: And those are the type of exercises in the win-loss analysis. Those are the things that any company can do. It's often said that the company who's closest to the market wins. Who is closest and can be more responsive to the market wins. How has product management always engaged their community? What are some of the ways that organizations have always stayed close to the market through their product management teams?

Steve: Well, I'm not sure how well across the board product managers do stay engaged with their teams. Certainly, when I sit down with product managers and ask them what they're doing in terms of ongoing research, whenever I say the word research, everybody envisions lab coats and clip boards and one-way mirrors or two-way mirrors or whatever those mirrors are. And focus groups and lab environments.

And the best product management insights come from discussions. Go on site, visit a customer, see how they use our product, see how they do their work-flow, and what we found at Primary Intelligence is you can get almost that same level on information through a phone call. We've been, in fact, we found that people are a tad more honest on the phone because they're not seeing your face. And so they kind of forget who they're talking to maybe. And after 10 minutes, they're just doing the whole thing.

In fact, I talked yesterday to a wonderful person at Hub Spot about my marketing automation needs and I started the phone call with I don't know have any marketing automation needs. And 15 minutes in, I'm just railing about all sorts of situation inside the company and it's just like if I played this thing back, I'm sure I would be appalled at what I said. There's so many opportunities that I shared with the sales rep in this case. But I found that to be true as I talked to anybody on the phone. After about 5 or 10 minutes, they kind of forget they're not, they forget they're talking to a research firm or a product manager and they feel like they're talking to a friend. And they can reveal an awful lot.

But whenever we talk about research, seems like everybody goes straight away to, "Oh, I need to hire a firm to do a survey," or I need to talk to the industry analyst to have them put together a study and gosh, just pick up the phone and talk to somebody.

Josh: I found that too on my last company wherein on product strategy, reaching out to somebody, saying do you have time for a 10 minute phone call? And whether it's a win-loss or just doing routine conversations with the customers or non-customers, the 10 minutes inevitably turns into 25 or 30 minutes and the data you collect is invaluable to the sales strategy, the marketing strategy, the product strategy, the support strategy. You learn so much more. Now, go ahead.

Steve: Mine's primary intelligence. I mean the first thing I did is I got on the phone with a dozen of customers, and it was really interesting to me. Universally, the customers talked about the power of our industry consultants. And yet, then I sat in on some of our sales calls, and we talked about our software delivery mechanism. And within just a few phone calls, I was able to turn to my sales team and say every conversation has to involve these three things, our industry expertise, our buyer voice methodology, and our True Voice software. And pretty much overnight, the sales team shifted over to this messaging and we're seeing stellar results.

Josh: So if staying engaged with your community and staying close to the market, really revolves around discussions, how have social media and social networks changed product management? Have they?

Steve: Well, I think that the methods, is that the right word? The methods of research are still the same. There's quantitative and qualitative. There's the stuff you see from, you hear in a phone discussion. There's the stuff you see in an onsite visit. On the other

side, there's surveys. In the old days, we did clip board surveys. We go to the mall and ask people questions or, and then the web came along and we moved all those things on to the web. So the methods are still the same. What's different is the medium. It's now so easy to do a web survey. You can use Survey Monkey, you can use the [Vohesi] product. They have a new name which I've forgotten. It's so easy to put together a web survey. But the challenge of a survey is you don't know what you don't know until you have the discussion to go with it. So you always need to balance the discussion which is where you learn new things, with the survey where you learn, where you can quantify what you've learned.

And one of the best new things that the social media world or the internet world makes possible, is we can have around-the-world customer advisory boards in our common online community that we just flat couldn't do 20 years ago. I remember vividly, I had a customer meeting in Virginia here where I lived, and I brought in probably 10, 11, 12 pretty high ranking people in financial services industry and they all came together and everybody in the company was like, "Oh, I really want to go, a few minutes talk into these folks. I want to present this and I want to present that." And of course, my sales guy standing in the hallway, going, "Oh, I need to take them out to dinner."

And the client said, "You know, we're not here for you to talk to us. We're here for you to listen to us." And it was so amazing. It was just a funny one. Had a quick break. The sales guy came pouring in and like, "Hey, when are you guys going to be done here so I can you out?" And the customer is like, "You know what, I'm not here to be taken out. If I want to go out, I'll go out with my wife. I can afford it, right. I'm not here to be social. I'm here to give you my insights so that your product gets better." And that was a really expensive proposition for us, to take people out of the field for that period of time and get all the mechanics of it. Now I can do that online. And the key is focus groups or online communities are more for discovery and less for validation.

Josh: So, is that to say that you, so the way that we usually lay it out is you can have those discussions in an online community or online customer community. A lot of the online community software have survey tools built in to confirm or validate those results. And then one of the methodologies that I like that I don't see very often is you have a small advisory group of customers on it for a specific product or the company overall. Using the file and video libraries built into an online community to do a 2 minute explanation of an idea. Here's what we've heard, here's what we're thinking. And then using the social threads attached to that to promote discussion within that small advisory group. Is that something that would help with the validation?

Steve: That's sounds brilliant. I mean, the key is, you need to be listening more than you're talking. And I remember a long time ago, I was involved in a face-to-face customer advisory board situation. And I sat there for 6 or 7 hours being talked at by the CTO and the CEO and the product manager.

And I didn't come here for training. You guys asked me to come here for advise and insights on how I use the product and the challenges that I have. But you're not listening.

Josh: It does wonders for the relationship when you have the discipline and let them know that they're heard and hopefully, eventually acted on what you've heard from them. But it does wonders beyond helping you with your product strategy.

Steve: Agreed. So, If doing this kind of concern, in this kind of research, well, pretty much any kind of research. You want to set up an opportunity to have discussions to weigh. Pick a side. One of the fairly common things I hear from product managers is the sales team wants to have me deliver the road map presentation for big customer X. And in variably, what I say is, well, I'll show you yours if you'll show me mine, the other way. That is, if we're going to show our road map to a client, I'm going to want the client to show me their road map. Where are they planning on being 3 years from now?

And there's some danger in that. They're saying we're completely going over here. We hate the cloud. We're going to do everything on our own premises and we come out with our road map that says by 3 years from now, we're going to be completely in the cloud, then there's a problem, right. But the point is, a presentation is one way. But discussion is two way. And then from that, the insights that you get, then you can back it up with at survey tool, or say, in that discussion, "Gosh. That's a really interesting thing you just said. We're working on something in that area. Let me show you a three-slide presentation or a prototype screening or a little video that we put together." And then we can use the same forum to validate.

Josh: I think that's a really good point. And in at Primary Intelligence, you're often brought into to manage, as we said, one of the most important tools in an organization's product strategy toolbox which is win-loss analysis. And from that engagement, you're able to see an organization's entire product management operation. Are businesses, using social channels, whether it's public social networks or private customer communities? Are they using them effectively to develop market driven product strategies?

Steve: Well, I want to say yes to that.

Josh: We'll generalize on that.

Steve: Well, speaking specifically to win-lose analysis. The reason I joined Primary Intelligence is I'm just fascinated with this win-loss analysis as a, just a key way of getting really insightful data at a comparatively low cost. I mean, if I can only do one kind of research, I would definitely want to be doing win-loss. And it's that whole tactics determining the strategy thing that we find out that our message doesn't resonate or whatever. But anyway, the surprising part is only 15% of product managers think that win-loss analysis is something they should be involved in. The vast majority of the people we talk... before they become our clients, is they're thinking this is something that belongs in sales operations and that's how we can find out who our bad sales people are so we can shoot them.

And certainly, that's not what we're trying to do here. We find, there are cases where certainly the sales team wasn't clear in what they communicated, or they didn't respond to customer request or whatever, but more often what we're finding is the presentation, the sales tools, the ROI calculator, the website, I mean the marketing campaigns didn't support the sale or the product had deficiencies competitively. And the other one we find which is terribly amusing is only about 10% of the time is price is an issue. And yet, if you ask sales people, between 80% and 90% of them will say it's always price. But anyway, I went off on that. But I think win-loss analysis such a really powerful tool and I'm surprised that more product managers are not taking advantage of it.

Josh: Is there a way to do win-loss analysis through social channels? I'm thinking it's best kept on the phone. Maybe you can use your customer community to inform some of the questions that you ask. But the traditional in person or on-the-phone win-loss analysis really seems like it should be kept traditional.

Steve: Yeah. I think so. I think there are a number of questions that you could ask in a web survey format. Was our price 10% higher or 10% lower than our competitor, or what products did you look at? I mean, some fairly binary sort of things. But the discussions want to be some form of live. Either a phone discussion or a face-to-face discussion. And the thing that we found as we develop our products is having somebody on the other end of the phone who understands products and industry.

Many of our, many of the stories I've heard are about companies that tried to do win-loss with only a survey or they do through some college kids they hire to ask a bunch of questions. And the client says, "Well, my issue was X, Y, and zed." And the sales, the college kid says, "Oh, it must be really interesting." And they write that down and they go to the next without saying, "Oh, wow. I've never heard that before. Let's drill down on that particular point."

Likewise, a lot of people say, "Well, gosh. I'm on Twitter all the time. I should totally be able to use Twitter to as a research tool." And, you know what, I can, because my customers are on Twitter. That is product managers and product marketing people. I don't know if anybody else can because the real question is not are you on Twitter, but are your customers on Twitter.

Josh: That's a good point in terms of whether you're using a public social network or a private online community, where you're going to get the most adoption, most engagement with your community. So there is no, like a lot of enterprise social initiatives. There is no one way to do it.

I think one of the big take-aways that I heard you say earlier and that should be exciting for organizations is that this isn't a new way of doing business and creating product strategies. This is a, sometimes a more effective and efficient way to use traditional, or I keep using the word traditional. But existing product management methodologies. And that's important. They don't have . . . because a lot of times, the online community, well, can be intimidating for people who are used to working offline or building relationships face-to-face, to know that they can continue to do what they know just in an online environment. Is that...

Steve: I think so many younger people are saying, "Well, I'm going to do everything through my computer window," right? My Twitter, my LinkedIn, my Google Reader, my whatever is, my monitor is my window into the world. And these are the folks seeing to get out of the office once in a while and sit down with a real client, or at least hop on the phone. It's so not hard to do. And depending on what your phone system is, you can call around the world as easily as you can call the town. And it's just amazing how easy it is that we get people on the phone and they're like, I'm so glad to talk to you as supposed to what do you want and how quickly can I get off this call.

Josh: Right. Right. So sounds like when we're talking about online communities and product management, it's more a way to keep the market more engaged with traditional research methods than it is new methodologies being born out of social platforms. Is that what you're saying?

Steve: I think that's very true. Yes. The old ways are good ways. The good news is there's, it's so much easier to do nowadays because we've got new media to get there. But it's fundamentally . . . I've been thinking about it is there's a lot. I wrote an article about Agile methods. And, for some reason, my dad said, "Oh. I'd be interested in reading that." And I'm like okay. I mean what would an old guy understand about Agile, right. So I sent it to him and he writes me back and he said, "I was pretty much doing this kind of stuff in the '60s. I mean this is good rudimentary planning. You listen to the market, you decide what you're going to do, you do it, you review how you did and then you tell people." And I went, "Oh, yeah. That basically is every process diagrammed throughout history." And I think so often, people come along and say, "but what we're doing is new."

Josh: And it's true. It's true. And that's a great news for companies and associations and other organizations, that they don't have to start a revolution to take advantage of online communities and social channels. And it's not going to replace traditional product management methodology. Whether it's phone, whether it's in person, whether it's focused groups. It just enhances them and sometimes lets you do it better and faster and more efficiently.

One of the new things that I see or one or the things that I could ask a lot about in the product management world is how do you collect data across the company when everybody's listening now? That's one of the differences, it may be different. I mean the past, your support team and your sales team are always out in the market. But if everybody has a social dashboard on their desktop and they're seeing something that's going on the market, how do product managers aggregate that information or should they care about what everyone else is seeing?

Steve: I think they should care. I don't know how they're doing it. There's so much unstructured data available to us know. We can go into Twitter and search on hash tags, or we get an e-mail from our favorite sales guy. We get a support a support ticket. We get an issue in JIRA. We have lots of inputs. But the part that really is scary as you said is there's input happening around the company that product managers don't even know about and how do we centralize that, and my sad answer is I don't know how we do. Unless we can use some sort of unstructured wiki controller thingy dingy like. Say Confluence from Atlassian. And say, if we could get all this unstructured data in one place, then from that, we can discern the patterns and identify what features need to be turned into issues. And I think that's an opportunity that has not yet been fulfilled in some of the tools that are available today. I do know that as a general rule, if you put it in SharePoint, no one will ever find it again.

Josh: That's kind of a...

Steve: idea graveyard.

Josh: That's good. So it's a good rule of thumb. But I think you really make a really good point. That if your processes aren't sound getting more data from you community and more market data in general, it's going to cause problems. And product managers need to, and this is one of those things that's going to be specific to each organizations. Product managers need to, with the opportunity that online communities present, product managers need to find ways to better manage the data that's being fire hosed in their direction.

Steve: True. And sadly today, we're still using Excel and PowerPoint and Word as our primary productivity tools. I am seeing a fair number of people embrace some new things like Accept360 and the product from Atlassian like JIRA and Confluence. I'm still not sure there's a solution there for product management to take ideas through, all the way through to a user's story. And unfortunately, many of the teams that I worked in, the user's story is the basic building block. But unfortunately, that's too atomic to do, I mean a roadmap is not merely a chronology of user stories. We need something, a bigger container than that. So it's quite a challenge. But I do think that product managers and product owners need to have personal experience in the market place. I know the guys at Pragmatic Marketing suggest that you do win-loss visits and customer interview fairly frequently. What I found is product managers should do some, and then send the rest to us at Primary Intelligence.

Josh: I like the plug. Now, you talked about Agile product development methodologies and how they've, they're popular, they've changed the way organizations can respond to the market and get products to market. But one of the things I've heard you say is that the terrible thing about Agile is that you can ship the wrong things faster than ever. What are some of the pitfalls that companies should look out for when they're listening to their community?

Steve: Well, I think you kind of answered the question in your question. The key is to listen to your community. I think what happened is we get, I'm sorry. Let me back up. Agile is wonderful. You're able take some input, make a decision, spend 2 weeks working on it. See that you've achieved what you set out to achieve. Everybody gets a high five and we do it all over again. It's a wonderful method for, Scrum, in particular, that's a wonderful method for planning. Extreme Programming is a wonderful approach to building better technology. There's a lot of goodness in Agile.

The scary part of Agile is, as you've said, is we can now build the wrong thing faster than ever. And if the ideas coming in to the team are merely ideas from the inside the company, then you could easily find yourself building the wrong thing unless you can validate it with market insight. There's a general rule that anybody can add to the backlog. But the problem is, we use the term backlog in many ways. There's a release backlog, I'm sorry, there's a product backlog, there's a release backlog and there's a sprint backlog.

And, so when we say anybody can add to the backlog that introduces some confusion. Development says, "Oh, I think it'd be really cool if we did this. Let's add it to the back log." The question is which backlog? And the answer is I feel really good. Anybody can add things to the big pocket list of things we want to do to the product. But only the product manager or the product owner can add things to the sprint backlog, what we're building right now. Otherwise, you find yourself building a whole bunch of stuff that nobody has [vet] in the market.

Josh: So, I want to, a couple more questions. So bringing it down to a tactical level. Supposed the company has an online customer community where they're engaging their customers around support topics and the technology, we'll just see a lot of online communities that stem from a support need. How can they start using that community and that platform to innovate and plan more profitable products? What are some of the first steps that they can take to transition an engaged community to one that where they're listening to the community for, to improve product management?

Steve: Well, from the starting place, there are abilities within an online community for you to at least validate some of the decisions or some of the, yeah, some of the ideas that we have. So we say, "You know what, we've got these 14 things that we want to work on. Let's vote on those 14, and just let the votes determine." It was kind of funny. As I'm telling this, I'm reminded of, I did a user group thing many years ago. And they wanted the adviser, the, whoever you call the leaders of the customer, the executive team of the customer advisory board, said that they wanted to have, they wanted to participate in prioritization. And so this is before we had online community. So we're doing this live, and I brought, I got a bunch of candy containers. They're like things that nuts come in or gummy bears come in, and I ripped off the label from Costco and then I taped on an index card that was the name of something we wanted to work on.

And then I handed everybody in the meeting a bag of jelly bellies, jelly beans. And I said, "Okay. These are your votes." And already the guy from JP Morgan is like, "Oh, I need another bag because I've already eaten about 10 of my jelly beans, right." So I handed him another bag. And then I'm like, "Okay. Here you go. Everybody gets 50 votes. Throw them in the various containers until you're out of jelly beans." And there was one guy, I remember vividly, took his entire bag, didn't look at anything. Took his entire bag over to the first one which was our technology direction, and just flung the whole bag into the big jar.

And we can use that same technique today without the jelly beans although they are kind of fun. So we can use the online community as a way of validating the things that we've decided to. But I think the other thing that we can do, because we don't have to have everyone co-located, is we can say, "Okay. I'd like to hear some stories about these problems. So, the development team came up with this really cool idea to do a widget that does a thing with the weather and the zip code and your LinkedIn profile,

and have it go swirly, swirly, like this. And everybody goes, "Ooh. Swirly, swirly, that looks really good." And now, how would this help you? Tell me a story about this feature. If you had this feature, what could you do differently?

And now, I mean you immediately get, somebody goes, "That's just freaking brilliant." Or somebody goes, "Well, that's the dumbest thing I ever thought of. What drugs were you taking when you came up with that one?" But probably, you'll hear, here's a story about how I could use that. That story becomes your marketing message. It becomes the thing you tell your sales team, and it becomes that thing you tell your developers. It's that like I'm not sure if I should do this or this. Should I in addition to LinkedIn, should I do Hoovers and Facebook and 16 other things and you like hang. This is just sizzle. That doesn't have to be in a stake. Just do LinkedIn and we'll be done with it 1 day. And so you've got the context necessary to answer further questions.

Josh: I think when it comes to those discussions and just unstructured discussions, that's one of the most powerful elements of a private online customer community, is that you have the security and segmentation of be able to have this discussion with an entire customer base, with a small segment, with a very small advisory group. So you can not only get the initial data but validate that data pretty quickly and pretty efficiently without confusing customers with the other messages they're getting from other parts of your company.

Steve: Very true. In a similar way, I've never felt that you should share your secrets with people you cannot trust. And so many teams have to go through so much baggage because they're like, "Okay. I want to show this prototype to a customer. But I have to first get clearance from the sales guy." And then when I have that, I have to go to legal and get a 400 page non-disclosure agreement. Then I can sit down with the legal team of the buyer's side to fill out the NDA. And then I have to send 47 copies to everybody who has ever worked here. And it just gets too hard.

And the idea of like a pre-approved online community says these guys have already signed the paperwork. I don't have to get permission from everybody in the company to have a conversation with somebody. And I think that's the truly brilliant part. In my past, I've always have a couple of customers that I can reach out to on the sly and say, "Hey. Here's something I want to do." And I know it's not going to end up on the Internet. I know it's not going to end up in a contract. I know it's not going to get revealed to my competitor because I trust those people. And likewise, the people that you have in your online customer community, maybe not all of them, but the ones that you share ideas with, that should be that ones that you truly trust. And you know it's not going to go leaking out into the community.

Josh: Right. And that's one of the big differences between using public social networks and private social networks for product management.

Steve: Yeah. Go out on Twitter and I say, "We're thinking about this flim flam gadget gidget." And my competitor goes, "Damn. That's a good idea." And nowwe're on a race on who's got the better development team to get it out.

Josh: Right. Right. I ran across an organization. It was a small technology company recently who set up a dedicated Twitter feed for their product management team. And I just thought to myself, this is where people, customers, and people from the market can submit ideas and have a conversation there. If I were one of their competitors, I would just sit on that Twitter feed all day, and collect that information.

Steve: Yeah. I mean the presumpt-, yeah. Absolutely.

Josh: So...

Steve: A closed, a closed community means you can also select very carefully the members of it.

Josh: Absolutely.

Steve: Here's one fellow who follows me on Twitter, responds to me all the time, and he's just Mr. negative,. Every time he says anything like, "Steve, you're an idiot," or, "I disagree with everything you stand for and wow, you're unattractive as well." And it's just like, "Yah." He's not adding any value to the conversation. But in a public network, you cannot have those experiences. In a private network, you can say let me carefully choose who I want to be here. The only caution being, you don't want to just use your friends.

Josh: Right. Right. Now, in your past life at Pragmatic Marketing, you gave hundreds, maybe thousands of talks to people at all levels of an organization about product management and how that informs support and sales and marketing. So if you were standing up in front of a room full of executives, talking about listening to the community and how that can improve product management and how that helps with innovation and profitability and what is the one take-away that you'd want them to walk out of the room with?

Steve: Well, gosh. I do have to quote Pragmatic Marketing here. One of our favorite quotes, well, this is my favorite quote. This is, I don't know if it's coming out clearly but for me, a lot of product managers are living in a place called, "I'm just here to participate in your dysfunction." But the Pragmatic Marketing message is probably the right message for what you're asking. Your opinion, although interesting, is irrelevant.

Josh: I love that cup. I have that cup, I give that cup to people when I join new companies.

Steve: I've had so many events over the last few years where as part of the event, the organizer has gotten mugs of that quote for everybody in the room. But it's been interesting in some of the conversations I have had lately. I accept that as a mantra, and I get into a conversation and it's just amazing that bringing the market into your conversation has never even occur to the people I'm talking to. And yet, it depends on how to put it. I mean, I have found, oh, wait. Here you go.

The famous Henry Ford quote that Henry Ford never said, but Steve Jobs quoted, "You know, if I'd ask customers what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse." This seems to permeate a string. That customers are stupid and don't know what they need. The reality is that customers do know what problems they have. And Henry Ford, if he'd ask the question right, if you ask what features do people want, customers would have said I want a faster horse. If you ask him what problems they have, they would have said I want to go faster.

So if I had one sentence to share with an executive team, well, actually, the one I do today. I ask the executives, can you tell me why you win and lose deals? I mean, when everything else is set aside, that's really the issue. We've built a great product but we can't sell it or we've built a terrible product and we can't sell it. When we ask win-loss questions, we find out about our product and marketing and sales and support. But nonetheless. Can you tell me why you win and lose deals, and here's what I hear almost every time. The executive team says I know what people are telling, believe it. And we can tell you why you win and lose deals in the voice of your buyer, would you like to hear more? And then like, I'm totally there.

Josh: Right. It's a very foundational concept. And so, Steve, I want to thank you for sharing your insight and experience today. I hope we can do this again sometime. And before we go, where can people find you on the web?

Steve: Oh, gosh. I'm just, I'm just everywhere on the web. Maybe too many places. But let me send you a couple of places. I'm on Twitter at @sjohnson717. 717 is my birthday. I'm online at my website is blog.sjohnson717.com. And I also blog of course with Primary Intelligence. So you can go to the primary-intel.com, and find my blog there. So I've got a business blog at Primary Intel, I've got a personal blog which covers products as well as Star Trek and Star Wars, you know, important stuff, and silly cat videos from YouTube sometimes caught up there.

Josh: Yeah. It's the future. It is. So, it's really great information that you put out via Twitter and via your blog and a lot of times it's not the nuts and bolts of product management because a lot of companies get tied up in understanding what product management is and the role it should have in the company. I think one of your most popular e-books that you've ever produced is kind of the role of product management, and companies can get paralyzed in that before they ever get to solving market problems. So a lot of times, what you put out is education on product management, how it can, why it's important to a company.

Steve: Thank you.

Josh: So, Steve. I want to thank you once again for joining us. And as always, you can see all of the episodes of ProCommunity at Socious.com. You can also subscribe to the audio podcast on iTunes, where good reviews and five star ratings are always appreciated, especially if you heard what you like today. No, like what you heard today. I do that every show. Steve, thanks again and have a great day.

Steve: Glad to be here.

ProCommunity #4: Profiting From Customer Communities & Ole Fashioned Product Management

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 11:15:00 GMT

Discussing the Role of Online Communities and Social Channels in Product Management with Steve Johnson

Steve Johnson joins us for this episode of ProCommunity, the show where online communities meet business performance.

Steve is the Chief Marketing Officer at Primary Intelligence, a firm dedicated to helping organizations use primary-sourced market data to optimize sales, marketing, and product strategies. Prior to joining Primary Intelligence, he trained product managers, marketers, and executives for Pragmatic Marketing for over 15 years. Steve can be found on Twitter at @sjohnson717.

The Product Management Topics That We Chatted About:

What is product management and why should companies care?
How have product managers always engages communities?
Have social networks and online communities changed product management?
Are businesses using online customer communities to keep their market more engaged in traditional methods or are there new methodologies being born out of social platforms?
Small steps companies can take to start using their online customer community platform to innovate and plan products
Ways to manage the increase in market data coming from social channels
Pitfalls to avoid when using online communities in product management

Employee Collaboration and Its Impact on Productivity [Transcript]

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 20:06:00 GMT

In episode #3 of ProCommunity, I spoke with Jacob Morgan, Principle at Chess Media Group. We discussed Jacob's new book, The Collaborative Organization, on the importance of employee, customer, and partners collaboration across an organization.

The conversation also included the the costs of not collaborating, how companies can get employees more comfortable with online tools, and how to overcome the biggest challnges of employee collaboration.

ProCommunity #3 Transcript: Enterprise Collaboration

Josh: Welcome to Episode 3 of ProCommunity, the show where online community meets a business performance. I'm Josh Paul, and you can see all of the ProCommunity episodes at Socious.com and you can also subscribe to it as an audio podcast in iTunes.

I'm very pleased to have with me today Jacob Morgan, principle at management and strategic advisory consultancy Chess Media Group and author of a new book, The Collaborative Organization. Welcome Jacob.

Jacob: Thanks for having me.

Josh: Thanks for being here. The basic premise of the book and the Enterprise 2.0 movement is that people have knowledge that can benefit others and can benefit the organization - and companies excel when that information is findable, sharable, and expandable. That information could be old information, historic information, or it could be new information that's being created in real time, new ways of doing things and such. Is that the basic idea? What did I get wrong there?

Jacob: No, not at all, that's exactly right. It's all about connecting people to each other and to information. Find people to create content, to share content. Engage your people. Everything that is required and involved in connecting and engaging and interacting with people and with each other. So collaboration, communication across boundaries, learning you're next door to someone or thousands of miles away. You described it very succinctly, which is great.

Josh: For years, companies and organizations have had e-mail and intranets and instance message clients. Why should organization care about collaboration more than they already do? Why should they look towards the future?

Jacob: Good question. One of the things I always talk about is that collaboration is an idea that's been around for a long, long time - but what is new are these new sets of tools and technologies that we have and we have these new behaviors that we have today. Fueled by what's going on in the consumer world.

The consumer world would be things like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Blogs, etc. These have really given us the opportunity to be much more public with a lot of the stuff that we create, with a lot of the things that we do. It's a lot easier to find information and connect with people. And we're taking those behaviors into Enterprise, where we expect similar things to happen. We want it to be just as easy within our company to be able to connect with a coworker as it is on Facebook to connect with a friend. We want it to be just as easy to find something internally, if it's in our file, as it is to find something with Google.

We're taking all these behaviors with us into the enterprise in terms of how we want to engage and interact and create with our employees. And these enterprises are struggling to adapt. Going forward - especially as things become more competitive, as companies continue to spread out its new, younger employees into the workforce - it's increasingly important to be able to make sure that these employees not only can connect and engage with each other and information, but to make sure that employees that are currently leaving the workforce are able to transfer that knowledge and information to those that are entering the workforce.

There's a lot going on with collaboration and communication for a lot of companies today.

Josh: A lot of the costs of having this information locked up in individual employees' heads - a lot of those costs are hidden. Can you walk me through some of the collaboration costs that companies maybe incurring, but that they might not know about?

Jacob: Well, one of the simplest, most common ones is communication of content. How many times has it happened where an employee creates something only to find out that somebody else has already created it? Or they started doing something like that? And they only find out, for example if they're working together on a team they might send you an e-mail saying "Hey, I just put this document together" and you might respond and say "Actually, I already did this last week, why don't we just combine the two documents together and see what makes sense?" Duplication of content is something that you see quite often in a lot of organizations. Time and time again, that's probably one the biggest things.

Searching for information is also a huge cost. I think Gartner or Forrester did a study and found that 25% to 30% of an employee's time is spent just looking for information. So we're talking about a little more than one day a week, all they do is just look for stuff. You don't even work - you just look and try to find stuff that you need to get your job done.

These are some very, very common costs that we see in a lot of enterprises - duplication of content, and just the amount of time it take to find and search for information before you can get your job done.

Josh: That makes a lot of sense so a lot of the cause is similar to online customer communities, where I do a lot of my work. The benefits aren't new benefits, and the problems aren't new problems - it's really just empowering people with the tools to solve those problems more easily, more efficiently, given the emergent collaboration technology. That's actually a term that I use that I had stolen from you many, many months ago.

When you talk about "emergent collaboration technology," what are you referring to? Because this is a term you're hearing more and more.

Jacob: Exactly. Really I'm just talking about these new pieces of software that are getting used in enterprises. I refer to it as, kind of the way Andrew MacAfee refereed to emergent collaboration. This new set of web-based technologies that allow us to solve problems - any web-based technology that has this kind of collaborative and social component behind it that organizations can use, either internally or with customers or with partners. It’s just a new way to do things.

Josh: Now, some companies - at Associates we work with companies who approach collaboration from the customer community/customer first perspective - and then they end up bring in partners and employees, and they all collaboration together and collaborate independently. I think there are equally as many companies who start with employees first. Do you have a feeling as to, or any research, as to which is a better approach? Because one of the things in the book that was clear was that there is no one way to do this, it really depends on what your organization is trying to solve.

Jacob: Yeah. That's very true - and I've kind of gone back and forth on that. Part of me has always said that you should collaborate internally before you get your customers, but then part of me realizes that the barrier to entry for customers always is a lot less.

Also, to do something internal we have to go through legal, we have to go through IT group, we have to get permissions - this is assuming we want it to be deployed across your enterprise to have it sanctioned by corporate. Costs are a lot greater in there - you have tools often times to deploy across an enterprise, they aren't free. There are some premium models, if you want all the features and functionality you're going to have to pay for it. So the costs are greater, and it's just much more difficult for the person to want this within the enterprise. Well, not more difficult, there are a lot more hurdles to go over.

Whereas on the customer side, it's very easy to break out on our Facebook page and start connecting with people and start talking. So I think there are pros and cons, but I think that if you do engage internally with employees first, it's always that much easier to do on the customer side. Just because people already understand what the value is, what the benefit is, why you're doing it. However, I do understand that doing it the other way, might be a little bit easier for some companies just because of the low barriers and different cost equation.

I think it really depends on the company. I think every company that I talk to today is doing something on the social side, and something on the internal side. Every company has at least some kind of a SharePoint deployment and every company has at least a Facebook page or a Twitter account. I think both are kind of happening concurrently, but I don't know of many companies that, for example, only do something externally and nothing internally - or only do something internally and nothing externally. I think it really depends on what makes sense for each company.

Josh: Continuing along that theme of "it really depends on each company," in your experience, where in the organization does the drive for more collaboration come from? Who needs to be involved for it to be successful? And where does it originate? Or is it not clear at this point?

Jacob: I've had discussions with people from all sorts of departments. Sometimes it does originate from the CEO, or sometimes it comes from the CIO, sometimes it comes from HR, sometimes it comes from corporate communications. I've seen it come from a variety of roles in enterprises, so I don't think that it's always coming from one consistent spot or one place.

I think it really depends on where the business drivers are coming from. Sometimes this is a corporate communication issue, and they do what they need and are the first ones to initiate. Very often you you hear from IT professionals who say that they are responsible for it as well. At companies like Unisys, the CEO of Unisys really helped put all this forward. At companies like Telus, the senior executive has been very much involved, and so has their senior director of learning, Dan Hunterbrach.

I think it really depends. I don't think that you'll find one consistent place where it's always this particular goal that needs this service, or a person that's always reaching out trying to get this stuff going. And that's kind of what makes it interesting, that it comes from a lot of different places, and from a lot of different goals and responsibilities.

Josh: You have a framework in the book that kind of works no matter where in the organization the driver is stemming from. Can you talk a little bit about that adaptive framework?

Jacob: Sure. The point of the adaptive framework - means basically the companies that we've been working with and the research that we did, we basically identified a series of areas that organizations need to look at and consider when making collaborative investments. These five areas are things like technology, organizational culture, and there are a couple others. In each of these big areas there are a couple of smaller areas that organizations need. For example, under technology there might be things like maintenance and upgrade, or things like what is the technology built on that we want to use.

So you have this big bucket and smaller things that you need to consider within that bucket. The point of this framework is to allow organizations to understand a couple things. First is the five things they need to consider, and the second thing is what sub-areas they need to consider in each of these broader five areas. And the reason it's adaptive is because every company can look at this and say "okay, this is what we have done, this is what we haven't done - this is where we're strong, this is where we're weak." I might look at this framework and say "hey, I need to focus on the culture piece or the technology piece," and you might look at this and say "no, I'm actually great in those areas, I don't need to focus on that."

It doesn't force companies down a step one, step two, step three path - it basically shows them what the whole things looks like and says "okay, figure out where your strengths and weaknesses are, these are all the things that you need to consider at some point." And that's really, that's the point of it.

Josh: I think one of the things that makes a framework like that so powerful is that organizations as a first step, and this is probably what Chess Media Group does, is you can do a strength analysis according to the framework. So you say, you can rate it one through five each piece of the framework. Here's how strong we are in each of these areas.

Jacob: Yep, exactly. We can walk organization through an assessment. In the book, I don't know if you saw, there's this grid that basically looks at each of these five areas and how far along a company is in each of those five areas. So it's a type of a maturity model assessment, so you can go through it and not only look at what these areas are, but how far along you are in each of these areas. You can identify your strengths and weaknesses, whether it's around goals and objectives or governance or organizational culture or process or technology. You can follow this grid and see "okay, on governance, on these five areas, how far ahead are we versus maybe on something like technology." It allows you to have this kind of a self-assessment done and see where your strengths and weaknesses are and where you're going to be spending your private effort.

Josh: I found it very useful.

Jacob: Thank you.

Josh: I could see where it would apply to our customers. Now, one of the biggest questions that I get around Enterprise 2.0 and internally collaboration is, is internally collaboration just for big businesses and big organizations like universities and hospitals, or can a mid-sizes organization or small business capitalize on this trend?

Jacob: I think any company. I mean, Chess Media Group is a very tiny company too, you know we only have small handful of employees. But we use things like Skype, we use that type of stuff ourselves. We're a small company, but we're virtual, so we're spread out. I think any organization that's looking for a more effective, more efficient way to collaborate and communicate with each other - especially one that's spread out, that has a lot of information that it wants to able to keep track of everything - I think any size company can do this.

In the book there's a case study of a company called FSG. When I started writing this thing they only had around 80 employees, so not by any means a mid- or medium sized company, still very much a small company - they were able to use it. The Chess Media Group, again small handful of people, we're able to use it. So, I don't think they size of the company matters, I think it's the problem that you want to solve.

Josh: Now, I think that's a good point. Let's take that a level lower. So if I'm some CEO who'd like to have happier employees, more productive employees, and I think that collaborative technology and collaborative strategies are the way I can do this - how do I get started? What are some small steps I can take to both test this, get employees comfortable, and see some benefit?

Jacob: A good question. That's a very common question, where's a good place to start? I think, as far as where to get started, I think one of the important things that a lot of companies can do - and we started doing this recently as well - are around employee surveys. Trying to find out where employee collaboration might already exist. Or where, maybe it doesn't exist by maybe it's a big need. And the way that you can find that out is by asking employees. "Are you guys currently working using these technologies? Are there problems you need to solve?" First you need to understand what's happening in your company already. And you can use those areas as kind of springboards from where to start.

Broadly speaking, aside from that, one of the first things you want to do is start to develop your use-cases. Again, a lot of this might be done by interviewing employees, trying to find out how they currently work, how might these tools be used, how it could enhance the way that they work. So you develop your set of use-cases that then translate into what you need to be looking for as far as features or platforms. Typically once you have your use-cases you look for a platform, we'll obvious develop some sort of strategy of why you want to do it, how you're going to get funds to use it, what's the future going to look like. Develop use cases, deploy platform, kind of go from there and adapt.

There's a whole 17 or 18 step frame work in the book. Chapter 12, well I won't get into all that. But at a very, very high level that's typically what you do. Identify the use-cases, build a team, evaluate platforms, make strategies happen, deploy, evaluate and adapt as you go forward. But going forward, I think that one of the things that companies need to do but often skip out on and forget is A) [strategy, report and] technology part and B) is developing a use-case to clearly understand how and why employees are going to be using these things. So those are some very, very common areas to overlook.

And again, I also think it's really, really important to ask employees already, what are they currently doing? Where do they see opportunities for collaboration? What issues do they see with the company? Especially if you're a large company with thousands of employees; ask them this question in advance will really help you kind of visualize and understand where opportunities might exist, or where you might have barriers to collaboration.

Josh: I think that's helpful. And, of course, just like with external communities and customer communities, internal communities really start with the problem that you're trying to solve for your target audience, most importantly. What are the biggest, or what are some of the biggest challenges that organizations face when trying to transition to a more collaborative work environment?

Jacob: There are a couple challenges. I think that first is having the supportive culture or work environment. Meaning you're not just deploying the technologies that are necessary but you have a kind of corporate vibe, so to speak, that supports collaboration. Meaning that, if your company is very, very much focused on individual performance and competitiveness, it's going to become very hard all of a sudden to tell employees that they should be collaborating with each other. Because this whole time you've been telling them that they should be competing with each other.

That is definitely a hurdle - how do you overcome that. Education, training, and [here's a] human resource form that [companies looking into learning] about collaboration, something that a lot of companies sometimes forget about. Executive support - Not just in terms of writing a check, but in terms of an executive actually having a presence and participating in and engaging employees on these channels.

Also a big challenge for a lot of companies to overcome - a lot of existing technologies that companies have, a lot of legacy systems that they've used to create a front door for the enterprise. Having put all that stuff together.

Finding the right platform and the right vendor is always a challenge. You see a lot of companies that pick one and then change their mind later and switch. I think one of the biggest issues that we see with a lot of companies is employee adoptions. Employee tools, how do we get employees to use them?

Josh: How do you get employees comfortable with that kind of sharing? It's something that I struggle with. Employees have a personal brand, how do you get them to share more openly? And earlier in their thought process?

Jacob: A lot of these employees are already doing stuff like this on Twitter and Facebook. As far as doing it internally, I think there are a couple things to do. Again, having that supportive corporate culture is very important. Education and training is important. How you position the value - do you position this as "this is how it's going to benefit our company" or you can mention this to the employee and say "this is how it's going to benefit you as an individual, as an employee, this is how it's going to positively impact your life and what you do." I think it's important to position it like that.

I'm not a big fan of forcing, I think that encouraging and monitoring and suggesting and providing feedback to employees and how they use these tools is always very important. And I think one of the most important things is addressing areas of resistance employees have. Things like they say they don't have too much time, "we don't have time to do something like this," or "we're already overwhelmed with existing technology."

We did a big research project last year surveying 204 people to find out a whole series of things about collaboration, and one of the things we found out were what are the areas of resistance for employees, for managers, or IT. That can be as a good starting point to understand what employee resistance, why does it typically happen - and if you know that in advance, you know how to deal with it.

For example, one of the things that organizations can expect to hear is employees saying "we don't have time to use this." If you know that's going to be a resistance, how can you address that up front? One of the things that we've done is to say, "actually this is going to help save you time," and provide examples of how it will save time for employees. Giving examples, giving stories of how it's actually helping employees save time instead of making it sounds like something that's going to take more hours out of the day.

Understanding these types of resistance up front, and how to counter them, is very important.

Josh: Those are actually really helpful tips - that I think our listeners are going to put into practice right away. So, to wrap up, two more questions; is it fair for organizations to expect business-level benefits from internal collaboration? Making more money, saving more money, serving more people?

Jacob: I think so. Although the top drivers that we've seen, again coming from the research project that we put together, the top drivers that we've seen haven't been around making money or saving money - they've been around connecting employees, connecting people, and connecting information together. That was the number one business drive from a user front to put people together. People saying that they want to connect and collaborate and communication across boundaries, they want to connect to people and connect to information.

But you have to think about what happens when you do that. New ideas will always happen. And some of those ideas will be product ideas. They will be cost-cutting ideas. I think that it's expected and it will happen, that you will get some new revenue-generating opportunities and some new ideas for how the company can save money. And this has been pretty continuous across all the companies I've spoken to. It's always one of those things where it's not a primary business driver, it's not something that anybody can predict in advance before they deploy something, but it's typically of benefit and of value and all these companies end up saving.

Josh: I think you're right - the connecting employees and connecting information will eventually lead to business benefits.

Jacob: Yeah, Oce is a good example of a company; they're an outsourcing company. And one the employees had an idea to incentivize truck drivers to pull up at local gas stations instead of at the highways, which was more expensive. That one incentivization idea that they deployed helped save them 800,000 Euros annually. Now, again, you couldn't predict that idea would happen, can't predict and anticipate that something like that would happen. You don't know when it will happen. But, again, it did happen and it saved them quite a lot of money. And there are countless examples [like] that.

Josh: Yeah, your book includes a lot of really great examples. And the more examples that are out there, the more senior management teams are going to get it.

You do a lot of writing, you do a lot of speaking. Last question; if you were talking to a room full of top level executives about the collaborative organization, what is the one thing, the one take-away you'd want them to walk out of the room with?

Jacob: The one thing that I find fascinating that we don't talk about enough, is this whole notion or concept that collaboration makes the world a better place. The reason I wrote the book is because that idea needed to have some sort of strategic value and tactics behind it that could actually help a business leader or executive do something with the idea. To go from the idea to an action, that's why I wrote the book.

But I think that notion of collaboration making the world a better place is extremely powerful. And what I mean by that is if you can empower your employees, if you can make it easier for them to get their jobs done, you can make it easier for them to work in more flexible work environments, you can get them more passionate and engaged with what you're doing - I think that has a lot of interesting impact on employees outside the workplace. Maybe you'll get into less arguments with our spouse when you get home, if you're less stressed about work. You'll have more time to spend with family if you have a flexible work environment. Or it'll be easier for you to get work done because these tools and strategies means that you can get work done more effectively and efficiently, which means that you have time for yourself.

I think a lot of these concepts of collaboration have a pretty positive impact just in general on the lives of employees. And I think for the first time in business today, organization have this opportunity to invest in technology and strategy that not only positively impacts the business, but also positively impacts the lives of the people outside and inside of the workplace. So I think that's one of the things that I would like to start focusing on more, and one of the things that I would like to start seeing more data and researching around. I think that's one of the most powerful things that we can do, right, is positively impact the lives of people.

Josh: That aspirational note is really a great way to end this, and something that probably fuels a lot of what you do. And we hope that you continue to provide us with insight around that. Jacob, I want to thank you again for joining us today on ProCommunity. I hope that we can do this again sometime.

Jacob: Yeah, that'd be great!

Josh: And, before we go, where can people find you on the web?

Jacob: It's very easy to get a hold of me. I'm on Twitter @JacobM - if you forget, just Google Jacob Morgan, you should find the link to the blog and stuff like that. The blog is Social Business Adviser, the company is Chess Media Group, and the book is The Collaborative Organization. You can go to collaborativeorganization.com or just search on that Amazon.

Josh: It's really a great book - I have it right here. Go check it out. Make sure it's right side up. And, as always, you can see all the episodes of ProCommunity at Socious.com. You can subscribe to the podcast in an audio format on iTunes, where good reviews and five star rating are appreciated, especially if you like what you heard today. Jacob, I want to thank you again for joining me and have a great day.

Jacob: Thank you very much. Same to you.

ProCommunity #3: Work 2.0, Social Collaboration, & Enterprise Social Networks

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 11:24:00 GMT

Discussing the Challenges and Benefits of Enterprise Collaboration with Jacob Morgan

Jacob Morgan joins us for this episode of ProCommunity, the show where online communities meet business performance.

Jacob is a Principle at Chess Media Group, a management consulting and strategic advisory firm with a specialty in employee, customer, and partner collaboration. Jacob is also the author of the new book, The Collaborative Organization. Jacob can be found on Twitter at @jacobm.

The Enterprise Collaboration Topics That We Chatted About:

What is emergent collaboration?
Why should organizations care about collaboration?
The hidden costs of a lack of collaboration
How can companies get employees more comfortable with online collaboration?
Is collaboration just for big business or large organizations?
What are the biggest challenges of transitioning to a collaborative organization?
Small steps companies can take to get started with enterprise collaboration

The State of Enterprise Online Communities [Transcript]

Thu, 19 Jul 2012 18:10:00 GMT

In episode #2 of Socious’ podcast, ProCommunity, I spoke with Rachel Happe, Principal at The Community Roundtable. We discussed where organizations are in their use of both internal and external online communities to drive real business results.

The conversation also included the characteristics of organizations that benefit from a community, the evolution of online community management, and how to find the right balance between strategic planning and community management.

ProCommunity #2 Transcript: Enterprise Online Communities

Josh: Welcome to Episode 2 of ProCommunity, the show where business performance meets online community. I'm Josh Paul, and as always, you can find this podcast on iTunes, and you can see all the past episodes of ProCommunity on the Socious website at socious.com/procommunity.

I'm very pleased to have with me today, Rachel Happe, principal at The Community Roundtable, one of my favorite places to go for online community research and advice. Welcome, Rachel.

Rachel: Thank you, Josh. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Josh: So Rachel, I was recently recommending The Community Roundtable to a Socious customer, and I described it one way, and then, later on I went to your website, and I found out that you not only do the one that I described, but you do about ten other things. So, The Community Roundtable is a membership organization, it's an education organization, it's an information service. How do you describe The Community Roundtable?

Rachel: So, our tagline is "advancing the business of community," because what we do particularly well is understand business and understand how communities fit in to business versus online communities for fun, online communities for all sorts of other things, and the way we view ourselves is as an information services business. Really targeted at education, training, peer connection, all the things you need to understand how communities work in a business setting.

And, what you've probably noticed is, we started The CR Network, which is really this peer organization that average members, at director level, a person that's been charged with translating a social business strategy into an operational and execution strategy, and then hiring out the teams and the resources and acquiring the technology to go and do that.

And that's really where we started, because, at the time, when we started three years ago, those people were very isolated. We knew a set of them, and they were learning by themselves in a very isolated setting, and oftentimes, their bosses didn't really fully understand what it was that they were doing, and so they were re-explaining themselves a lot.

And we also felt like adoption of technology was taking off, but people weren't really thinking about the management implications of that. And so, we also saw the need in the market to educate the market, generally, about the human aspect of what is now known as social business, but at the time was social media, primarily, or I was an early advocate of calling it "the social organization."

And so from that base, we've developed some advisory services, we've developed on online training class with [Walma], and so we have a training class for community specialists, for community managers, and community strategists. That's very, very helpful for just setting the contacts for the role.

We also do executive education series; we're expanding our research services. As you know, we've done "The State of Community Management" for a number of years now, it's our annual compilation of everything we're learning with our members.

We're going to get into more quantitative research as well, targeted at a variety of different audiences, meaning, there's everyone from the hands-on community managers and moderators all the way up to senior executives that need to understand a different slice of the community puzzle, so that they can put that in appropriate context.

Josh: That makes sense, and . . . I love the focus of the business of online community, that, in some ways, inspired the production of this web show and podcast. Really there's a big difference between online communities for fun and for hobby, and achieving business goals using online communities. As The Community Roundtable has grown up, have you . . . do people get it? Do people get that there's a business element to online communities versus social media for fun, or . . . ?

Rachel: Absolutely. In the core of the people that we work with, absolutely. I think it's still unclear, all the ramifications of that, meaning that's largely what our members are working through right now, which is, "What does it mean for support? What does it mean for marketing? What does it mean for HR and hiring? What does it mean . . . or what are the implications to organizational structure because of this change in the information environment?"

Information is power and so is . . . and structure is a part of power, as well as information, and so, how do the two play together? I think we're just seeing how that plays out, particularly in organizations that existed long before the changes in the information environment.

We're seeing a lot more innovative models in newer organizations, which makes sense, because they're really taking advantage of some of these new mechanisms. So, yes, and the hype around community management has certainly increased in the last three years, meaning, it's used broadly, and I think, often, kind of casually.

And I'm not sure that everyone that uses the term really understands what it means, but for a core set of individuals, they really do understand how adding that to business structure is different. It's not the same as an emergent community that rises up because of an interest group.

The business is actually promoting the community, and so you have derive and give a lot more value to the community to get it off the ground. It doesn't just rise out of the ether, typically, for most organizations.

Josh: Right, right. And you mention, companies are just starting to understand and articulate what it means, what community means, what customer communities and term communities mean for different parts of their business, different components.

So let's get into a couple of those. What do online communities do for businesses? What are you seeing online communities do for companies?

Rachel: So one of the oldest use cases of online communities is in the tech space for customer support. Autodesk, SAP, IBM, some of these other . . . EMC is another example, VMware, Adobe. They've had communities for 5 to 10 years, maybe longer. If you look at some of the Autodesk communities, they've been doing this for a really long time.

And the benefits are huge, because a company can never support content creation for niche use cases. At the scale of an IBM, or an Adobe, or an SAP, you can't ever address a market of 20 people. It's just not going to happen. But, those 20 people can find each other and really share learnings together, and really juice that use case in that they can find other people that also would value from that application of the technology.

So now, not only are they supporting each other, but they're advocating and building content around that niche use case that attracts other people, and so it really starts scaling how many people you can support, how deeply you can support them, and how many market segments and niches you can go after.

So on the external side, it really changes the cost structure and the value chain of those business functions.

Josh: All right. I like that. That's what we've seen for the past 10 years, it really . . . Up until recently, it was primarily support communities, user group communities, and the support and the market advocacy can be . . . have grown exponentially using a community rather than traditional, one-to-one call center or ticketing approaches.

Rachel: And I don't think that's going to go away. There's always the unique, "I need to deal with my account. I need to buy a new feature. I need to . . . ," something very specific to me and my account. We'll always have that one-to-one, but in the more general . . . and actually, I think complexity really drives it, too.

On the simplest consumer products, does a community really help? Maybe. It gives people new ideas of how to use a pen, potentially, meaning there's a Sharpie community, where there's crazy things that people have done with Sharpies. But people don't need support around using a Sharpie.

Josh: Right, right. And you get into the B-to-B community versus B-to-C community.

Rachel: Yeah, and then I feel like, on the B-to-B side, you get into really complex things, that if you're a supplier to an automotive company, or you're building big generators for the government, or what have you, and it's really custom complex work, then you're working with a team to co-build that product. You may not find any help in a broader community because it's so specific and so complex to that one item.

Josh: That's a good point.

Rachel: The community's not really helpful. So there's a middle ground there where communities are really, really useful.

Josh: So what are some of the characteristics of an organization that may benefit from a community? Have you been able to identify any of those?

Rachel: Well, I would say that any company that wants to do more with less, there's an opportunity to use community. The one caveat, and this a big caveat is you have to have a culture that's willing to give up a little control in order to get that scale.

And that's a big, hard-to-identify caveat, meaning you don't really know until you experiment with your internal culture, whether they can accept or that they can move to accept something like that, because the control culture in most organizations is very strong.

And to really be successful at community, you have to say, "Okay, well, I'm going to let the community decide to use our product in this way or to talk about us in this way, and I'm going to be okay with the fact that they may not like everything about us."

Josh: Do you have an approach that works for companies, or that you've seen work successfully to change that culture?

Rachel: So, what I typically recommend, and this is a good example on the internal collaboration front. A lot of executives don't want their employees chit-chatting on social channels, meaning sharing non-work stuff, because it looks like they're not being productive and kind of fooling around.

However, that very unstructured, un-work related conversation really helps people get comfortable with the platform, with the dynamics, with communicating in this networked way, and that's a really important stepping stone to getting at really important work. Because if you don't have that comfort level in the culture, around unimportant topics, you're never going to get the comfort level in the organization around important topics.

And so, a lot of things that I try and help companies identify are things like, "Where is a non-business urgent, but slightly relevant conversation going on?" So, a lot of companies have United Way campaigns, of kind of HR campaigns around social events for employees, or what have you.

They're somewhat business-oriented, in that they're sponsored by the organization, but they're not going to be seen as risky to participate in at the individual level. So, supporting the United Way campaign is not going to have somebody see that and judge my work or judge my work output, which is what really keeps individuals, on the internal side, from participating is, "I don't see the benefit, and I only see the risks of exposing myself."

Josh: I really like that idea of kind of a less mission-critical test balloon to build comfort and to show senior management that this is how it would operate, this is how it would work.

Rachel: Yeah. And one example, that I gave to an advisory client was, a lot of their constituent base was doing RFPs. I said, "Well, maybe they're not comfortable discussing the RFP process yet, or collaborating on their responses yet, but can we start a conversation about, 'What music do you listen to, to get through and RFP?'"

Because everybody knows, doing RFPs is one of the least exciting things that you can do. So, what are the techniques that you use? Do you get up every hour? How do you break up doing an RFP in a way that keeps you energized and engaged and gets you through it? That's work related, it helps with productivity, but it's not exposing anybody.

Josh: So, I'm glad you brought up internal communities, because this is a . . . I want to build on a conversation that you and I had at the recent Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. What are some of the parallels and differences between employee-only internal communities and customer communities that bring customers, employees, and partners together?

Rachel: So, there are different motivators. Completely different motivators for participating, and there's different constraints. So, externally, a lot of the motivation for people to participate is, they either really like the company, or they have an issue. And both of those can be strong motivators.

There's far fewer constraints, meaning, now that I have Twitter, I can go out and complain or say nice things about anyone, and nothing's really stopping me, and there's no real social constraint to doing that unless, of course, I have a public persona of some sort. And when you have a public persona, you're more careful about what you share, externally. But if I'm your average consumer and I want to get an answer, there's nothing constraining me from doing that.

Internally, all of us are bound by employment contracts, and we're bound by our jobs, and our jobs are very critical to our livelihoods and our lives, and we know that we can get fired, or reprimanded, or that our...how we participate really has implication for our companies. And so, there's a lot more sensitivity around those motivations, and a lot more constraints.

And culture . . . I find enterprise, and organization culture, is actually a bigger barrier than economic or any other, meaning, if you look weird congratulating somebody on a new baby, internally, you're just not going to do it. If you get the hairy eyeball from people, that's a pretty big disincentive.

And add to that, a lot of companies have taken a very black and white approach to social media, initially, meaning they say, "Just don't do it. We don't know what this is all about yet. Just don't say anything about the company on social media."

And then, at some point, they say, "Oh, this might be useful. We're going to change our minds about that." But you've already set the expectation with employees that engaging is risky, and so now, you're flipping your mind. That's going to be a really hard impression to change with employees, and they're going to wonder, "Well, is this the hot new topic for 6 months, or are you really changing this permanently? Are you committed to changing this permanently, or are you just testing things?"

And if you're just testing things, it's still risk to participate, because you might change your mind later, and all of a sudden, I've exposed myself. So, there's a lot of complexity going on, internally, that just doesn't exist on the open web, and the problem, really, is you need to give people permission and a lot of encouragement to participate, whereas online, you still need encouragement to participate in positive ways, but there's less friction there.

Josh: Right, and there's less chance of it getting back to the people who you work with on a daily basis. I work in the online community world, and I still find myself, on a daily basis saying, "No, I probably wouldn't share that on an internal online community." Even if it's part of my job. I'm still not completely comfortable with sharing everything with my co-workers. There's a personal branding aspect to it.

Rachel: It's a personal . . . you know your career's dependent on it, and the other thing that I have found . . . I used to work in management consulting, where we were producing a heck of a lot on a weekly basis for clients. But, there was a real culture of you completed something before you asked for review, and certainly before you publish it to anybody else.

Working out loud is working on in-process stuff and sharing in-process stuff, which is completely different than what most of us have been kind of culturally trained to do in our organization. There are some enormous benefits, both to us and to the organization for doing that, meaning, it's a little bit the lazy man's approach, which is, you can crowd-source your own work if you do it well.

Josh: And you're testing and validating...

Rachel: And you're testing and validating...

Josh: ...ideas before you get too far down the road.

Rachel: You're getting buy-in before you publish that thing, so it's actually anticipated and read when it's done, which is huge because so many of our organizations, we replicate work like nobody's business. And you post it to some content management system, and it sits there. I worked with a client who deleted something like 60,000 share point sites, and no one noticed.

Josh: Wow.

Rachel: This is a huge, multi-national, so keep that in mind, it was a huge scale. Anyways, but there's so much content that doesn't get used, and it's because we don't market our work internally very well, and what social tools and communities can do is help us gain buy-in and shared value from the work that we're doing, so there's huge benefit. But it's a completely different way of working, and that takes time to get people used to that.

Josh: Yeah. I can see working out loud and sharing work before it is production ready and ready to be sold internally is a huge shock to the system.

Rachel: It makes everybody nervous.

Josh: Oh, yeah.

Rachel: Yeah.

Josh: I want to switch gears for a second. Talk about some of the research that you do. You said for several years, you've been publishing the "State of Community Management Report," and you've been on several . . . you've blogged about it, you've released the report, you've been on several webinars and podcasts talking about it. But one of the things I was wondering is, what surprised you the most about the 2012 report?

Rachel: Because it was a compilation of what we were learning with our members, the surprise in the content wasn't . . . it wasn't surprising content, but what really surprised me was the environment in 2012 and how the social web changed. Up to that point, there had been a lot of issues like United Breaks Guitars, or the Motrin Moms, or the Domino's cheese-up-the-nose video, a lot of these individual incidents that caused a huge uproar online.

What changed in 2012 was communities were recognizing and inserting their power online to make fundamental changes to organizations. So, the Arab Spring is part of that. That was major leadership change, if you recall, in a couple of different countries.

The Susan G Komen Foundation, they didn't have an online community, they didn't test their policy change with their constituent base. They made a policy change that outraged people. Two senior leaders left as a result of that.

The Bank of America policy change about ATM fees, that one person set off a community revolt around that. It changed their policy. So when I look at 2012, I see communities understanding and using the power that they have, and that's a really interesting change for companies, because you can crisis-manage an issue with a customer. You can do it badly, but if you do it well, that's one discreet issue.

If you've got people that are upset about your policies . . . SOPA/PIPA is another example of that, at the government level. Now, what the general population is saying, you, as an organization, really don't have control anymore. Whether you think you do or not, or whether you're participating in social media or not, whether you have online communities or not, we can assert our strength, by ourselves, without your participation at all.

And I think all of those organizations would have benefited from an online community strategy as a risk mitigation strategy, meaning, if they had tested all of these changes with a community of 1000 people, they would have understood pretty quickly what the bigger reaction might have been, and at the very least, they would have been prepared for that.

Their decision may not have changed, but they would have been prepared from a messaging and a positioning perspective on, "Why we're doing this, and what the implications are, and, if you have an issue, here is the path to have the conversation."

Josh: I think that testing element is a big takeaway. You have a product strategy background and any company, or organization, or government agency can really benefit from testing and validating. It doesn't have to be a large crowd.

I mean, look at Netflix last summer. If they had an online community that they were able to test their changes with, they would've saved themselves a lot of profit loss.

Rachel: Right. And the other thing that that does is, if you really have relationships with that community, you're also building advocates. So now you have 1000 people who can also help respond to some of the issues in their little niche of the web, and so that gives you a lot more scale when you're trying to manage a change.

Josh: Absolutely.

Rachel: I'm not saying you don't change, but there's a way to manage that in a better way.

Josh: You're completely right about that. And so, with the state of online community management, have you . . . You've been doing it for a number of years. Have you seen . . . or in what ways have you seen the attitudes of executives...non-community practitioning executives, just run-of-the-mill executives, I guess. How have you seen their attitudes change towards online communities and customer communities?

Rachel: So, what's really changed is that, I think social tools and methodologies, including community approaches, are really front and center now. Nobody...I don't hear a lot of, "This is a fad," anymore, and I think executives are seeing their peers and other organizations be very successful. There's enough case studies out there where, I think, interest and intrigue is peaked.

What I think is still lacking is connecting the strategic dots down to the operational, "Okay. If this is what you want to do, this is how you should approach the problem. This is what you need to do organizationally to really be successful here."

And actually, one of the things we're planning to do at The Community Roundtable over the next 12 months is roll out a couple of new research platforms and transition the "State of Community Management Report" into a more quantitative-based, longitudinal study of what's going on, because we feel like the market has matured.

We've been doing qualitative analysis for a number of years, and now we feel like there are some patterns and practices that all good social businesses kind of deploy in the process.

And that's largely what a lot of the 2012 report was about, was saying, "This is what companies do at each stage of maturity. These are the typical initiatives they undertake, this is what moves them into the next stage, and this is typically what the patterns of management are at each of these stages."

So we know that now, and now we can start collecting data on top of that and say, "Okay. How many companies are doing each of these things? And how fast, really does a company mature through this stage?" We have a lot of anecdotal data, but we need to transition that into actual data.

Josh: That's really exciting that those are coming down the pike. So let's talk about the way that communities mature and the life cycle. You did a webinar with Socious in January, where you and the director of the VMware user group kind of went through your online community maturity model, and you talked about the principles behind it, and he talked about what it looked like in action. And you have one of the most widely-accepted online community maturity models.

Can you talk about what, exactly, that is and how it came about?

Rachel: Well, it came about because I have a background in new product development management, and there's a lot of similar dynamics around management decision-making, in that, in new product development, you're making huge investment bets far ahead of the results that you're going to get.

And so, you really need to take a portfolio management approach, and there's a lot of risk involved, and you need to understand the boundaries of that risk. You need to understand what you know and what you don't know, and you need to be open to some of that failing.

That's very similar in the social environment in that, unlike other process changes, you don't get immediate results when you decide to do a social strategy. You need to build that community, you need to build the network, and that takes a lot of investment.

And community management is really, I view it as, a portfolio of hundreds of tools, and the community manager picks the right tools for the right contacts at any particular time, and a tool that is not right to use early on may be great to use later. It's still a lot of this mix of art and science of figuring out what that portfolio mix of tools is to apply to a community approach to get long-term results.

And so the decision-making is very similar, and when I did new product development management, we used the capability/maturity model concept and had a new product development maturity model, and I took that concept and said, "It's very similar here." Which is, you have the same dynamic around management decision-making.

You need to make sure you have all these competencies lined up, and you can't jump to a productive community from a completely hierarchical structure. There is a pathway to get there. You need to work on your leadership, you need to work on your strategy, you need to work on your culture, you need to work on your toolsets, you need to work on this community management discipline, internally, so people know how to manage in this new way, because it's not hierarchical management.

You can't tell people in opt-in environments what to do. You can encourage them to do things, you can discourage them from doing things, you can kick them out if they're really misbehaving, but you cannot tell them what to do. So, how do you get people to do something through encouragement? Carrots and sticks.

And there's policies, and guidelines, and a governance model that needs to adapt to this, because if there's all these opt-in communities around your organization, how do you stay synced between all those different communities so that your engagement strategy and your corporate voice is the same and consistent?

So, that's really where that model came from, and what I think is powerful about the model is, it's specific enough that it gives you a roadmap and says, "Okay, here are all the things I should be thinking about and focused on." But it's not so specific that it only applies to you.

So, one of things we use it for at The Community Roundtable is to help translate between one context and the other and say, maybe our community team from Aetna is giving a case study about what they're doing on internal communities. They're talking about strategy, they're talking about leadership, they're talking about culture, they're talking about tools.

That model really helps translate for some of our association members or members who are in technology or some other vertical, to say, "Okay. This may be similar about my context, and this is different, but this is where that idea fits in this model."

Josh: I like it as looking at a Rosetta Stone of community management from company to company, because every company is different, and the organizations that we work with, that do follow that model, follow your maturity model, find it immensely helpful.

Rachel: Well, that's good to hear.

Josh: One of the things that . . . You show it to somebody, and their immediate reaction is, "Wow, I didn't realize so much goes into building a thriving community." And, how do organizations find the right balance between all the strategic planning that goes into social business and community management, both up-front and on an ongoing basis?

Rachel: That's an interesting question, because we've seen companies taking very different approaches there, which is, some companies do all the strategy up front and then back fill everything else, and some companies take a very experimental approach, where they are off doing a lot of things, and then they back into strategy and say, "Okay, now we need to reconcile all the things that we're working on."

And that, the second, is actually more common in really large organizations, because all these different functional groups decide that they're going to use Twitter for this, or have an internal network for that, and they you get 1000 flowers that have bloomed, which is actually good, because it's good learning for the organization.

But at some point, you want a consistent voice or a consistent approach to all of this.

Josh: You're always so positive. Organizations . . . 20 different departments, 20 different Twitter accounts, and it's a big mess, and you say, "Well, it's a good opportunity to learn." I always appreciate positivity.

Rachel: Well, the challenge with doing strategy up front is, every community, and every organization, and every ecosystem is different. So you're going to have to experiment somewhere in there. Because otherwise, you're not going to know what's going to work. So you can have a strategy, and it can be very wrapped up in a bow, and you go in and implement it, and your ecosystem just doesn't want what you're selling.

Josh: You are the chief maker of lemonade out of lemons in the community management world.

Rachel: There's . . . I just don't think that there is any way to get to a mature community and not have some experimentation in there. And actually, to be honest, I find that one of the biggest places where companies fall down is, they don't allow for that experimentation, because they see this as process change versus . . .

In technology organizations, when I was in product development, there was always a labs group. There was a pure research group where all they were doing was experimenting with stuff, and the point wasn't to be commercially viable, it was to see what happened.

Josh: Right.

Rachel: We absolutely need to go through that process when we build communities, and most companies don't realize that because they see this as changing marketing processes, or changing support processes, and, "Okay, well I change it and, boom, things should work the new way now." And you think . . . That's not the way it works in this particular discipline.

Josh: I can tell that comes from your product background as well. You want to fail fast and learn from that.

Rachel: Fail small.

Josh: Yes.

Rachel: So many companies go out, and they say, "I'm inviting my entire customer ecosystem into the community in 4 weeks. We have to have the technology ready, and we have to have content in there." And you say, "You're inviting your entire customer race into the community, and you don't understand the dynamics yet? You're insane!"

Josh: Yeah, that's a tough conversation to have.

Rachel: What's going to happen is, they're going to think of it as a content website. They're going to read all the content, and they're going to say, "What?" Because communities are really about relationships, and relationships take time to develop, so invite a small group in there, get the behavior change you want to see, and then start growing the community. Anyways, that's probably a longer topic of conversation.

Josh: So let's talk about community management, that's... A lot of your members are practitioners of community management. How have you seen community management change since you founded The Community Roundtable?

Rachel: When we started, community management was very niche. Somebody in the support group, somebody in the market group, kind of a very small team, often one person was in charge of it. Community management was also seen very much as a role, and we saw things differently.

We said, "Yes, it's a role, and it will always be a role. We'll always need that [ohms bud] person who's the central key between the community and the corporation and facilitating that and negotiating that power difference." However, as companies move into social business, it's a discipline of general management, because everyone's going to be online eventually.

And so you're going to need to know how to facilitate those conversations in a way you don't have control you over. And so, not only could every executive benefit from understanding community management and it's discipline so too could every line functional manager out there.

Because what happens is, if you do community management well as a functional manager, you manage in a way that commands and inspires people instead of controls them. And what happens then is, everybody wants to be on your team. You get more power for yourself by giving power to others and enabling others to do work that they're passionate about. And that's a really, really powerful thing to do.

I think, one of my lessons around community has really been that financial incentives, everyone needs them. Everybody needs their compensation, but people will actually give away financial incentives if they get connection, and purpose, and meaning, and mastery of things.

And so, as an organization, you can be more financially productive by imbuing your organization with meaning and purpose and connection, and dare I say, love. All of those terms make organizations so nervous.

Josh: Oh, I bet.

Rachel: That's not something we're . . . that is not a currency most organizations are comfortable in exchanging.

Josh: It's very fuzzy and fluffy and hard to quantify and . . . I . . .When you . . .

Rachel: It's fuzzy, but it has hard financial returns if you do it well.

Josh: Absolutely. Absolutely. You work with a lot of larger organizations... As you've been talking about the importance of community and the issues you run into, I think back . . . I worked for a large fortune 200 financial institution for several years, and it was earlier in my career, so I was at a lower level. I would have gladly forgone some monetary incentives, monetary compensation, for some company love.

Rachel: Yeah. And there's so many people out there. There was a study last year that said something like 74% of employees would switch jobs if they found a better opportunity. That's problematic.

Josh: Yeah. And it's not all compensation-based, monetary compensation-based.

Rachel: Well, that's kind of my point. I think most people are probably okay with their monetary compensation. That's not why they're ready to jump board, it's because they're miserable.

Josh: That's a really good point, it is. Are there any common mistakes that companies can avoid up front, or throughout the process when it comes to community management? You've been doing this for quite a long time, so are there common mistakes that you see the companies make that, if they knew about them by watching this webshow or listening to this podcast, that you'd save them some heartache?

Rachel: I think we've referenced the two biggest ones. One is the complexity of it. Again, part of the reason we originally built the community maturity model was just to make people aware of all the different pieces that go into this. It's not sending an intern out to tweet. In fact, that's a very risky, risky thing to just go do.

And secondly, setting the right expectations about the investment period and the return period, and what is required on the investment side to get the return is really critical, because communities need space to thrive, and they get a lot of pressure too soon to show results.

They're not given the chance to be successful, and I will often say communities look like a . . . Every community, even the most successful communities look like a failure before they look like a success, and if you don't have your time horizon set appropriately, you're going to look at that community and say it's a failure even though behavior change is happening, which is the hallmark of a successful early community, is they're getting behavior change to happen.

Not at scale yet, but they're figuring out how to change the dynamics of the sales process, the marketing process, the support process, the internal collaboration process, whatever it is. So, that's really, really important, and I don't think that's well understood, even today, even with all the work that's gone on in the space, I don't think that's well understood today.

Josh: I think that's invaluable, and it's one of the things that I love about The Community Roundtable is it does take a very real approach and give people the straight story, beyond the marketing and the blog posts and beyond everything that you see out there. You'll sit down with someone who says, "This takes time, this takes resources, this takes dedication, and however long you think it's going to take for your community to look like a picture perfect, successful community, double that or triple that." [Just outside of] their expectations.

Rachel: See, that's where I say, "I don't know." And that's part of the reason why we're moving into quantitative benchmarking, so that we can take a use case or a functional area and say, "You know what, for customer communities in this vertical, this is the typical growth path that we see across the industry."

So you can start plotting that out and start saying, "Okay, what is the time frame that I should really be allocating for this?" Because that's one of the things we don't...the industry does not have good quantitative information about yet.

Josh: That's going to be great data. People are thirsty for that.

Rachel: Yes, and we're looking for sponsors and partners on that, so I'm just going to add that . . .

Josh: Perfect.

Rachel: . . . because that's one of our goals towards the end of this year, is to start working with more partners on that research as well.

Josh: Outstanding. Well, I have one more question for you, and this kind of brings us back, full circle, to The Community Roundtable and what you provide, and that is, why is it important for community managers to learn from one another?

Rachel: If I had to pinpoint one thing, it's because it's more of an art than a science right now, and the things that senior community managers know, who have been doing it a while, are typically locked up in their heads. And the only way you get that out is by talking to each other and sharing stories and unstructured information.

Because this is such an innovative space, all of that information is tacit, and one of our goals, at The Community Roundtable, is making it less tacit, making it explicit knowledge. But, if you really want to understand it, that's why we have a peer network, so that you can share those stories directly, so that you can ask the questions.

Often, the most experienced people in this space don't know what they know, and so they need to be asked the question, "Well, how did you do that and why did you do that?" And you get their answers, and you say, "Oh, well that makes a lot of sense," and they learned that the hard way. But that's really important context to understand as a newer community manager.

Josh: I encourage everybody I talk to go check out The Community Roundtable, because it is . . .

Rachel: We very much appreciate that.

Josh: That peer-to-peer sharing is really important, especially since so much of the...the best of the best are not . . . It is locked up in their heads.

Rachel: And a big piece of our community is actually getting people on the phone to talk to each other. It's not the online piece, because there's something that is very powerful about that direct conversational interaction that you don't get online.

We share a lot online, and we actually record and transcribe all our conversations so that we are starting to document that knowledge, and that's what the State of Community Management is, is a compilation of all that documented knowledge. But, the space is evolving very quickly, so it's hard to keep up, even for us.

Josh: And the social business professionals I talk to say those conference calls are really one of the must-attend events of their week.

Rachel: Well, great. I'm glad to hear that.

Josh: Well Rachel, I want to thank you very much for your insight today. I hope we can do this again sometime.

Rachel: Thank you so much for having me, Joe.

Josh: And before we go, can you tell people where they can find you on the web?

Rachel: Yeah. My most constant chatter stream is on Twitter, and I'm @rhappe on Twitter.

Josh: Perfect. And as always, you can find ProCommunity episodes at socious.com/procommunity. You can also subscribe to the show in an audio podcast format on iTunes, where good reviews and five-star ratings are appreciated if you like what you heard today.

Rachel, I want to thank you once again. And have a great day.

Rachel: You, too. Take care.

ProCommunity #2: The Business of Online Community & Enterprise 2.0 Buy-In

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 11:49:00 GMT

Discussing Building Online Community Across The Enterprise with Rachel Happe

Rachel Happe joins us for this episode of ProCommunity, the show where online communities meet business performance.

Rachel is a Co-Founder and Principal at The Community Roundtable, an information services organization dedicated to the business of community. Rachel leads one of the largest membership organizations made up of community managers and social business professionals. She also produces The State of Community Management report. Rachel can be found on Twitter at @rhappe.

The Enterprise 2.0 Topics That We Chatted About:

What are online communities doing for companies?
The differences between internal and customer-facing communities
Characteristics of organizations that may benefit from a community
The Community Roundtable’s online community maturity model
Finding the right balance between strategic planning and community management
The evolution of online community management and where it is going

Watch the video and get more ProCommunity show information at http://www.socious.com/procommunity.

How to Improve Customer Relationships Using a Business-To-Business Online Community [Transcript]

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 13:07:00 GMT

In episode #1 of Socious’ web series, ProCommunity, I spoke with Vanessa DiMauro, CEO of Leader Networks. We discussed how business-to-business companies are using online customer communities to strengthen customer relationships and spur innovation.

We also covered the differences between business-to-consumer and business-to-business online communities, the process for creating a business-to-business online community, and how to get the most out of your online community metrics.

ProCommunity #1 Transcript: Business-To-Business Online Communities

Josh: Welcome to episode #1 of ProCommunity, the show where online community meets business performance. I'm Josh Paul and you can see all of the Pro Community episodes at socious.com/procommunity. You can also subscribe to the show as an audio podcast on iTunes.

I'm very pleased today to have with me, for our very first episode, Vanessa DiMauro, Founder and CEO of Leader Networks, a research and consulting firm that helps clients create social strategies and online communities for business. Thank you for joining us, Vanessa, and welcome.

Vanessa: It's my pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.

Josh: You speak to large crowds, hundreds, sometimes thousands of corporate executives, quite often. I'd like to know, is there a certain level of pressure you feel being our very first guest on Pro Community?

Vanessa: Absolutely! It's very exciting to have been included, and it's always wonderful to start to experiment with these new mediums. I know that we've had things like Google+ and Skype around for a while, but now we're starting to really use them for business communications and purposeful use. It's really exciting to be part of the ongoing experiment.

Josh: Good, we're thrilled to have you here. I know one of the areas that you've done a lot of work in is with B2B communities and customer communities. How do B2B online communities differ from other types of online communities in the overall social business conversation?

Vanessa: That's a great question. It's very common for communities to be considered one general giant thing. One of my jokes is that communities are like world peace. It seems like a great idea, but it means something different to each person. B2B communities are pretty specific, and there are some differences between business and consumer communities.

With business-to-business communities, some of the critical differentiators, or things that are unique, is that they often have a very defined audience as a business-to-business is engaging with a specific audience. It might be a development group, a leadership team. It might be an executive counselor. It might be a gathering around a topic or a subject matter expertise. You typically know your audience quite specifically. They're commonly gated, meaning that, again, the identity is pretty persistent and most often you need some tracer of identity. Maybe it's a log-in or maybe it's a membership profile.

The intention is very specific. Usually, it's around peer to peer exchanges of knowledge and information exchanges. It's usually not typically about marketing or broadcasts, but really about bringing together a group to solve a common problem or to explore a topic in greater detail over a longer period of time. Those are some of the differences between business-to-business communities and consumer based communities.

Consumer communities tend to collaborate and evaporate. Perhaps, you have a particular problem or issue, like solving your printer problem, or research the best restaurant, and maybe you move on and don't go back there until faced with the same question again. With B2B communities, and you blog quite a bit about the persistent nature of the relationship with the organization and that being one of its critical success factors.

Josh: Absolutely. The way I've always described it is they bring customers, employees and partners together for the success of the customer with that particular product or service. It's not a one-off thing, it's not a one week thing; it's an ongoing relationship. The stronger that relationship is, the more successful the customer will be and the more beneficial it is to the organization.

Vanessa: That's really an excellent way of phrasing it, the idea that the customer is the center of that universe. I think I alluded to that, but when you compare against a consumer community, yes, the goal is to get them to buy or explore or share, but it's not with the same sort of dedicated success metric. I think that's really well said. That's really neat.

Josh: You mentioned most B2B communities or customer communities are gated. Some are public and some have a hybrid component where parts are private and parts are public. What are the differences between a public, private and hybrid online community, and why are they all important?

Vanessa: Right. Many communities, as a share point, have many facets of each. There might be a public component, but there usually is an area that's fairly secure or private. To talk about some of the differences, I think about it in terms of goals, benefits and then measurements of success. With public communities, in many ways the goal is to be pretty large, typically. That's part of the reason why the public strategy has been determined; so that you can attract as many participants and members as possible. In many ways, the need for it to be, or the desire for it to be public in large really gets to market visibility and reach. The ability to broadcast information, maybe, help customers troubleshoot problems with products and services, learn about new offerings, things like that.

Those benefits are really around getting market penetration. You get the message out there. You can help people solve problems more directly. Very often, it's for cost reductions. We're seeing a lot of public communities, especially in the B2B space, emerge as a call center alternative. If you can get customers to solve each other's problems and self-serve, especially in the middle of the night, or when there's a specifically complex problem or even a very simple one that the call center doesn't need to address, a public community is a brilliant opportunity to enable customers in that way. Again, size mattering distinctly.

You measure that differently in terms of SEO and page rank. Things of that nature tend to be some of the major success factors. Am I reaching the audience I need to? Am I getting the information I need to get them so the broadest amount of people is possible? With private communities, member intimacy tends to be the primary goal. We see these a lot with organizations or even in the share function, but I'll talk about that in a moment, where an organization really wants to get closer to their customers. It could be an association; it could be a corporation, a not-for-profit, or an NGO. It can take many faces.

Here, there's a long standing relationship that wants to be furthered, and a peer to peer desire to communicate. There's more flexibility with the private communities in terms of the kind of information that you share with the members. You might be able to put up product road maps, or have a fairly open and transparent discussion about future directions of the organization or solicit member feedback, or all sorts of things that you might not want to engage in a public forum because it might be co-creation and thinking with members about different topics; R & D, for example. Some of the biggest benefits we see coming out of these types of communities is really speed to market.

When organizations co-create with their customers, maybe, get new ideas, do research and development, they're able to serve the market with products and services that the customers ask for directly. That kind of directional privacy is really important. We find that the more senior the audience is in a community, the less likely they are to participate in a public forum. We've built communities, everything from the FDI to the legal markets to physicians and doctors, and it's fairly consistent that the more closed the profession or the more senior the audience, the less likely they are to engage in the public space. Here, the metrics become less about public face and things like clicks, views, and page ranks, and a lot more centered on customer renewals, net promoter scores, customer intimacy values, and product use increase, things of that nature.

And then, with hybrid communities, those are usually communities that have a public face so you can optimize and get the benefits of the SEO and the sharing of the market information, but have an area where customers can log into and have those private discussions and access private information. It takes many different forms. The majority of the software is geared towards one of these models or the other, and it's quite a find to be able to service a tool that enables both.

Josh: You mentioned some of the goals that companies achieve using online communities and B2B communities. We've always broken it out into the marketing and sales categories; creating brand advocates, increasing your prospect to close ratio, decreasing the sale cycle. Then there's the customer support, customer retention, customer satisfaction aspect, and the product management and product innovation categories. There are three areas that we see companies and membership organizations getting the most benefit. You're an expert in B2B communities and B2B social business. In what capacity do B2B companies use online communities within those three categories, or beyond those three categories? Do you see something larger coming down the pike that extends beyond those boundaries?

Vanessa: It's been an interesting journey. Recent research revealed that about 47% of all B2B organizations are thinking about or have an online community to service their customers. We're starting to see a big shift. I'd be curious to see what your experience is, too, because we're in the same space in many ways. We're seeing more organizations starting to think about the impact of the community data on their core operations. They started out as marketing channels in many ways. Brand development opportunities and brand awareness opportunities; your first bucket. It's the second and third bucket where we see they're more likely to be able to determine the ROI and see the return for the effort. Impact in some of the core operations is starting to pick up more frequently. What do you see? What do you think?

Josh: I'm seeing everything falling within those three categories, but the data and analytics is so flexible that it's not the technology or communities that haven't evolved yet, it's different business units are just starting to understand how this can have an impact on their business level goals. As they come around, the data is there, the community is there, it's just a new way of doing business, a new way of managing customers. Even large organizations can only handle a certain number of initiatives at one time. We also see a lot of companies focused on internal communities, employee collaboration and employee productivity. Mainly, large companies are focused on that because they have the numbers. Do you think marketers and support executives and product managers, people with external facing responsibilities, customer facing responsibilities, do they get community? Are they starting to? Where are they on that life cycle of understanding?

Vanessa: Absolutely. Your point earlier about the metrics dovetails pretty directly into the executive level understanding of the value communities can sometimes bring to the organizations. Up until recently, we didn't have the analytics and a lot of the computing power to be able to mine the data and surface trends from the community participation. In many ways, a lot of organizations fell back upon counting that which they could count. This must be successful, because 427,000 people liked it. But did it lead to sales? Did it increase the footprint within the organization? Did it help the member feel a greater connectiveness or intimacy with the organization? We didn't know.

Now that the analytical power is there, a lot of the tools before us, but more importantly, organizations are starting to understand that unstructured data. Those that can be surfaced from the discussions, from the exchanges online are just as powerful and useful in this larger social business context. When organizations mine both the structured and unstructured data they can surface trends and see returns, and even identify whether a customer was positively or negatively impacted through their participation in the community. That's where the communities are starting to be more strategic within the organizations. The combination of the data and skill sets to mine the data and leverage it in appropriate ways is starting to raise communities into the awareness of the strategy executives, product and development, and even R & D. It's moving out of being only a marketing activity into many other areas of the organization as well.

Josh: I think what you said about the unstructured data is a really valuable point. I have a background in product management and product strategy, and every organization that I've worked with has pretty much relied on surveys. The better process is to start with interviews in getting that qualitative, unstructured data. You get a lot richer feedback about your product even though you're getting fewer responses. The data within that unstructured feedback is a lot of the times a lot more valuable, especially when you're starting to gather data and figuring out the direction that you need to ask further questions is really important. We start with interviews, and then process those interviews, and turn those into surveys to confirm that data rather than starting with surveys. That applies within communities and analyzing that unstructured data as well.

Vanessa: One great example that comes to mind was even as early as, I think, it was 1997. I was running a large online community for Cambridge Technology Partners called Cambridge Information Network. We had about 10,000 CIOs from larger organizations as part of this community. They started sharing information about this problem they were starting to have. It was the year 2000 problem. We knew there was an issue with the numbers, and they kept talking about the number conversions and some of the issues they were going to have in the client-server environment. They didn't have a name for it, but through word of mouth everyone became pretty poignantly aware that not only would they have to slash their innovation budgets, but they needed to address this burgeoning problem. We also learned that even though a lot of hoopla was around the year 2K problem, it was 1999 that was really the problem, not year 2K. Those set of numbers, while it wasn't as evangelized in the popular media because it wasn't as sexy, was more important.

We were able to mine those data and share with the larger organization, as the system integrator, that your buyers and our members are going to have this problem soon. Not only are they cutting expenditures, but gosh, they need a little bit of help. We were able to solve their problem and roll out a new service to CIOs in a way that they wanted it, as defined by them, before names were made and trends were identified. That's just one simple example of how an ear to the ground can become a win-win for everybody with the workers at the center.

Josh: That's a great example. We're just at the beginning of senior strategists and senior management beginning to understand how getting better market driven data can impact profitability and the roles that communities play in collecting that data and validating that data. Let's dive into the trenches for a second and talk about process. There are a lot of decisions that are made when you're planning an online community or an online customer community, and much of the community's success rides on making the right decision for that specific organization. How do you take a company from understanding that they need an online community to developing and launching an online community that's going to have an impact on their bottom line? What does that process look like?

Vanessa: Actually, our starting point is just to assume they may or may not need an online community. They're fashionable these days, and there are some criteria and behaviors that you want to look for in assessing whether an online community is right for your organization. I've actually published a couple of articles on the topic that can be downloaded from our website. In a nutshell, the ability to solve an evergreen problem, having customers who want to connect, there are a number of different criteria. We start by helping explore the strategic footprint with the company to see if it's a good fit by looking at some of the core business objectives that the organization wants to solve for a community, and making sure that they have what we like to call the "gimme." Every company is really great at identifying what's in it for them for a community, but unless there's value for the members and a dedicated focus to serve them, the community often doesn't work. It needs to be a two way street and a little heavily skewed towards serving the members.

First, we think it's very important to be able to identify the gives and the gets and really understand that they're there for the members. Then, we believe it's important to identify what that straw model for the community is. Who are you going to serve? In what ways? What do you have to offer them? We believe that the who dictates the how, when, where and why. You have to really understand the audience and what you're going to deliver. Then, we assume that, as a group, we probably have about 60, 70, 80% right, whatever you think you're going to build for the community, but until you vet with the community members, with your customers, with your prospects, whoever you're trying to serve, to find out not what they want in an online community, but what are their points of pain or what do they need from each other and from the organization to be valuable. It's the combination of developing straw models with an organization and vetting it with the members that you really have an accurate picture of what that community could look like from a behavioral and a featural perspective.

From there, you can identify what it's going to take to make this operational, what's the impact, what's the content requirements, what's the staffing and budget. Really identifying what you think is the value proposition and checking it with members. Unlike consumer communities, and we talked about this a little bit in the beginning, business-to-business communities need to take away pain or solve people's needs in order to be well used. You have to get that equation absolutely perfect, or else the rest doesn't follows suit. People don't use it, they don't value it, they don't want to spend their time there. That's a critical nut to solve. Finding the right online community software and then rolling out in a phased way, beta programs and giving some thought to member on-boarding and sustaining the community and conversations overtime, are absolutely critical.

Josh: Who typically owns the online community before, during the launch and after the launch? Which departments? Which executives?

Vanessa: We're seeing a shift. It used to be marketing all the time. Marketing always owned community. Now, we're seeing more product management, product development, even the office of strategy management and sometimes customer centers. There's a lot more variety as of probably six to nine months.

Josh: Speaking of shifts, what has surprised you the most about how social business has evolved over the past three years?

Vanessa: That's an excellent question. It's a really exciting time, as I'm sure you're seeing, too, to be in social business. There's so much opportunity and there's so many joys with this field. I think the biggest surprise, however, has been how much organizations have struggled with the metrics. In many ways, we forget that this is just good business, and any metrics or ROIs that we would apply to a normative line of business should apply in this context as well. If you can't make a business case, if you can't really understand the core value and understand the benefit, those types of things need to be really identified more and worked out. In a lot of ways, because the tools are free people perceive them to be free, and in many ways young people are leading the charter,it's easy to forget that this is a business and can have enormous returns for an organization, but it's not dabbling in tools. It has strategic value and returns for an organization. It should be taken with a strong degree of seriousness.

Josh: I like what you said about really making sure that the core of good business, or the core of social business, is helping people and helping them succeed with your products and services, helping them succeed in their jobs. If you don't get that right, the rest of it falls apart. Bringing it back to metrics for a second, you've done a lot to help large organizations better understand online community metrics. What are some of the big mistakes that people make, and how can organizations avoid them?

Vanessa: The metrics, in my opinion, need to serve the larger organizational strategy. Community and social business works when it reinforces or supports a larger organizational strategy. If you've got a new product or service and you need to get it out to market, if you need a deeper penetration of your product set for customers to understand, or more customer loyalty, that really needs to drive all of the social initiatives. Really keeping them in the same bucket, you look at your core strategy as an organization, where can social, where can community support, reinforce, or accelerate this. That's, I think, one of the most important things that we try to teach and try to work with organizations to understand. It's not about clicks, likes, and thumbs up if they're not traceable to supporting the larger goal. Putting it in context is really important.

Josh: That makes a lot of sense. It's just like any other business initiative in that regard. One last question for you, Vanessa. It's evident to many business people that communities can unlock an enormous amount of potential performance and profit in many areas across an organization. However, many people are not focused on that trend for any number of reasons. If you're speaking to a room full of executives, as you do often, what is the one thing that you would want them to understand about online communities?

Vanessa: We've talked a lot about the business and the metrics and things like that. At the end of the day you have to serve the members. The members are the most important part of the equation. When I think about online communities, the image that is very evocative in my mind, and the communities I've run that have been most successful, are really designed as membership organizations where processes, activities, and things that work in the face world. If you have a customer event, for example, that happens in person, there's an opportunity to extend that into the online community and support the members before, during and after activities.

If your customers tend to rely on their account reps or service call-ins to get information, think about using a community to support them and extend any in-person mile. Any way that communities can really accelerate and help the members is really what they need to be focused on. The technology, the tools, a lot of the metrics, they're important as well, too, but keep the member at the center and support them maniacally for it to reap the value and yield the returns that you're looking for for everyone.

Josh: It's interesting that that's not a social business concept. It's just good business, like you said. Vanessa, I want to thank you for sharing your insight and experience today. I hope we can do this again sometime.

Vanessa: Thank you.

Josh: Before we go, can you tell people where they can find you on the web?

Vanessa: My blog is blog.leadernetworks.com, and our website is leadernetworks.com with an "s". There's an active download section. We do quite a bit of research and case studies and things like that, to help service the industry. There's a mini-library of sorts that might help current and future community builders have metrics and processes and frameworks and case studies and stuff. Go shopping and enjoy. Thank you for having me.

Josh: Thank you. As always, you can see all of the Pro Community episodes at socious.com. You can also subscribe to this as an audio podcast on iTunes, where good reviews and four star ratings are appreciated, if you like what you heard today. Vanessa, I want to thank you once again, and wish you a great day.

Vanessa: You, too. Thank you, and thanks everyone for listening.

ProCommunity #1: The Keys to Understanding BtoB Social Business

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 06:16:00 GMT

Thanks for checking out the very first episode of ProCommunity. This is a project that Socious has been working on for a long time and we’re very excited to bring this level of insight to the social business community. We greatly value your feedback and comments.

Discussing BtoB Online Communities with Vanessa DiMauro

Vanessa DiMauro joins us for the inaugural episode of ProCommunity, the show where online communities meet business performance. Vanessa is the Founder and CEO of Leader Networks, a research and consulting firm that helps large businesses and membership organizations develop social business strategies and create B2B online communities. Along with being a popular speaker, author, and researcher, Vanessa is the research co-chair and board director for the Society of New Communications Research.

Note: Pardon the sound quality at times during this interview. The audio and video quality will improve as the series evolves.

The BtoB Social Business Topics That We Chatted About:

The differences between B2C and B2B online communities
The role of public, private, and hybrid online communities
The business-level goals the online communities help businesses reach
The process for creating a B2B online community
Online customer community metrics
Trends in B2B social business