Telligent

The Point of the Pilot is to Purchase the Software

Cecilia Edwards — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 14:00:00 GMT

The buying process for software sometimes includes some type of trial or pilot to verify that it will meet your intended business need. This process usually comes after there has been a considerable amount of research, and perhaps involved conversation with various vendors. Software demos have been held and existing customer stories explored. You've narrowed down the list of potential options and have chosen the front-runner. Now it is time to pilot.

Depending on the scenario, pilots do cost you – in addition to perhaps licenses, they cost you time, mental focus and potentially credibility points with those you ask to participate. In business, anything that requires an investment on your part deserves a return.

So what is the expected return on a pilot? The acquisition of the piloted software, of course.

If you are going to make the investment of time, energy, focus and dollars in doing the pilot, your objective should be not to just spend time getting to know the software, but also in engaging in the necessary activities to move to the next step in the buying process.

There is a straightforward pilot process that can help you accomplish just that.

1. Strategize: The first step is to build a strategy for your pilot.

Strategizing for your pilot should not be a long, drawn out process. It should be a thoughtful one that will help you with your purchase decision at the end. You should strive to accomplish two things:

Establish the business objectives of the pilot
Determine the success metrics, i.e. if these things are proven by the end of the pilot, you are going to purchase the software

2. Design: Determine what the pilot will look like.

It really is insufficient for you to merely ask a few people (in some cases hundreds of people) to “play” with the software for a while and tell you what they think. In most instances, the software is not yet a part of how people do business. Therefore, they are likely to look at it briefly at first because it is something new and shiny, and then ignore it until you ask for feedback on the last day of the pilot. When you do ask for this feedback, it is likely to result in a broad mix of things that may or may not be at all relevant to the purchase decision.

Instead, you want to take the time to explicitly determine what the pilot will look like:

Identify a specific set of tasks you want tested during the pilot to help validate the objectives – Keep it simple, this will ensure success, while gaining momentum.
If relevant, spell out how the software will be configured to support these activities
Decide how feedback will be gathered as people execute the tasks. An iterative approach is much more meaningful than “hurry up and submit your eval forms”
Keep it short. Is there really a reason why a pilot needs to run past 30 days? Sometimes yes, but often times you know what you need to know in a relatively short timeframe. If you keep it short and meaningful you can move on to reaping the business benefit sooner.

3. Pilot: Execute the tasks as designed.

Now that you’ve strategized and designed things, it is time to implement your pilot. This should be an iterative process:

Execute the tasks
Gather feedback and measure the success
Make adjustments to the process or software as necessary
Iterate on tasks again

4. Validate: Make a determination of your success.

Because you started the process by determining what success would look like before you started, you and the other decision-makers should have an easy time determining the success of the pilot. Based on data gathered during the pilot phase, you should be able to document your success. (I’m not even entertaining the idea of failure here since you were able to iterate during the pilot phase to make any corrections necessary for your success at this point.)

5. Purchase: Reap the reward of your investment in the pilot.

Not only do you now have the reward of bringing your software purchasing process to a close, but you also have a built in set of change agents to support its implementation in your organization. The people who participated in the pilot have a clear understanding of what the software can do, and how it can add value to your organization as determined by the business objectives you originally set. They are both equipped and likely predisposed to encouraging others to adopt the software in the manner you intended.

The next time you consider piloting software, remember that your reward comes from purchasing. Design your process in a way that will pay off for you.

[Thumbnail plane image source:] Big Stock Photo

How to Measure the Strategic Value of Online Communities

Cecilia Edwards — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 14:00:00 GMT

Maybe you just launched your community a few months ago. Perhaps you've been up and running for a while. Either way, now is a good time to ask yourself “How is my community doing?”

How you answer this question depends on your business objectives for online community. One of the exercises that I like to walk our customers through is strategic value mapping, the process of aligning business benefits with a company’s stakeholders. Consider the following example for an online customer support community:

The Strategic Value Map for a Sample Customer Support Community

Read this map from bottom to top – you want to come away with how you can learn from the community and use it as a vehicle to increase shareholder value.

Learning

Simply stated, an online community for social customer service should deliver insights that fall into these categories:

Current Customers – What do your customers need from your products and services?
Prospective Customers – What do your future customers need from you?
Integration – What opportunities exist for you to integrate your products and services in order to enhance your value proposition?

Internal

An online community for customer support will help you gain a better understanding for how to best position your products and services with current and prospective customers, but only if your internal constituents are hearing what the community is telling them.

When your employees, across all departments, have access to the data coming from community, you can achieve the following benefits:

Scalability – You can scale the delivery of customer support.
Education – You can better educate customers on products and services.
Engagement – You can increase the amount of customer engagement.
Knowledge – You can more broadly share employee knowledge.
Reputation – You can build and protect your brand reputation.

Community Members

You have to give value in order to receive value. The success of any community, whether it’s for social support, social marketing or social commerce, depends on your ability to engage members by delivering information that they cannot find anywhere else. Online customer support communities help you help your customers by:

Increasing their knowledge of how to use your products and services.
Giving them access to information for how to use your products and services in unconventional ways.
Learning best practices from other customers with shared experiences.
Providing customers with a format for demonstrating their expertise.
Engaging in roadmap conversations that allow them to influence the future of your products and services.

Financial

Positive financial outcomes are the proverbial cherries on top of the sundae. You have the customer insight, your employees are informed, and your community members are enjoying an exceptional level of customer experience, BUT how do you quantify how community influences your bottom line?

Here’s how customer support communities impact your business in monetary terms:

Customers upgrade
Customers buy more
You attract more customers
You curb the cost of managing growth

Look at each of these categories in your own business and tell me what you find. I’ll be covering the process of strategic value mapping in my “Vital Signs” strategy workshop at The Big Social user group conference in September. Hope to see you there.

[Thumbnail strategy image source:] Big Stock Photo

Internal Online Communities – Introducing 10 Beneficial Business Use Cases

Cecilia Edwards — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 14:00:00 GMT

When speaking about internal online social communities, it is common to hear people say that they want ‘Facebook inside the firewall’. No they don’t. Facebook is about having fun and connecting with your friends. In business terms, this is called wasting time. If you view your internal community as Facebook behind the firewall, you will have low adoption because management won’t want their employees wasting time on it, and as a result, will not push its adoption. Employees will believe that management thinks they are wasting time if they use it, so they will avoid exploring its use as a potential business tool.

What companies are really after is a social experience much like Facebook, but instead is targeted towards business objectives that will lead to a heftier bottom line for the company. Here are ten use cases commonly seen in successful online communities that have a clear business focus.

1. Sales Enablement

The use case most obviously connected with impacting the financial performance of a company is sales enablement. Companies are creating the ability for sales people to search for, ask questions about, provide feedback on, and request specific pieces of content to support their sales process. During active sales cycles they are also able to share information and collaborate with others in their company on the best ways to close a sale.

2. M&A

Companies engaged in merger and acquisition activities typically need to pull groups of people together from around the company to work on the deal. Private groups can be established that allow only specifically named people to post, access content and participate in the conversations. This helps keep your internal team on the same page throughout the process.

3. Project Collaboration

Some geographically dispersed companies have been able to use groups on their internal community to accelerate the formation of cross-functional teams and reduce the amount of time necessary to complete projects. In addition to projects taking up to 30% less time to complete, companies have been able to increase the quality of their efforts by tapping into the appropriate expertise from around the organization.

4. Innovation and Ideation

As one of the top priorities on the minds of most C-level executives, companies are seeking ways to harness the power of their employees to come up with new ideas and get broad feedback on the popularity and quality of those ideas. Through online communities, they are able to work together to quantify the value and manage the implementation of the best ideas. Not only does the company gain access to a broader pool of ideas, but employee retention can be enhanced by providing recognition for top contributors in the community.

5. Corporate Communication

Companies with internal communities can say goodbye forever to the all-company email. Those types of communication can now take place in the community, where notifications can be sent via email. This reduces the amount of time employees spend searching for that important email they saw come in, but didn’t choose to read at the time. The full history of these important communications is kept in one convenient place in the community for all to access when they need it. Additionally, a blog from the C-Suite can boost awareness of the community, drive adoption and open lines of communication with executives.

6. Corporate Directory

Regardless of the advances in technology, the corporate directory is still an immensely valuable tool inside of companies. With the use of an online community, even greater value can be derived from it. With the inclusion of expertise information on the profile, new employees are able to find the appropriate people to help them with tasks almost as fast as the company veterans. People with shared interest can be readily identified through search enabling, expert discovery and the formation of more inclusive professional networks.

7. Training

Loading up your community with lots of valuable information and instructional videos can make it a valuable tool for training. Some companies have seen the biggest benefit in the employee onboarding process. One company was able to save millions of dollars by using their community to help new employees get up to speed on HR materials, company policies, company orientation, product knowledge, job specific skills development, and how to operate within the organizational structure. The savings come from accelerating the time when a new employee becomes productive, as well as the reduction in the amount of time existing personnel needed to devote to the process.

8. Meeting Management

Keeping track of recurring meetings, posting agendas, sharing minutes and assigning action items are things commonly done in internal online communities. Through the use of wikis, the management of action items is greatly reduced because everyone has the ability to see the actions, who owns them, when they are due and the current status. The transparency that this provides can be a significant motivator for people to complete their actions without the need to dedicate valuable resources to constantly follow up.

9. Internal Support

One of the dominant use cases for online communities externally is support. This same use case also exists inside most companies. A good example of how a company can meet the needs of their employees (without adding resources) shows up regarding IT support. Companies often standardize their information technology on a particular platform and do not officially support other platforms. Unless expressly forbidden though, employees will bring their own, or otherwise find a way to use, unofficial technology. Many companies allow groups to form and be managed by employees, resulting in crowd-sourced support for those employees.

10. Virtual Meetings and Events

Sometimes you just don’t need to have your employees in the same place at the same time. As a way to boost productivity, some companies have virtual events that encourage everyone to engage in a particular behavior and then share their experiences during a fixed period of time. For example, one software company held a “hack-a-thon” where all of their developers were asked to take a few hours to build something unique and share it with the community. A discussion ensued in the community and the best ideas were passed on to product management for evaluation as potential additions to the product.

There are a number of permutations of the above that are clear business-related objectives that will help your employees do their jobs faster, better or cheaper. The key is finding the ones that make the most sense for your business and sharing those with your employees.

[Thumbnail football image source:] Big Stock Photo

Is Customer Experience the New Marketing?

Cecilia Edwards — Fri, 08 Jun 2012 18:40:00 GMT

In May, Telligent hosted a webinar with three guest speakers – Kate Leggett from Forrester Research, Inc., Lewis Simons from Cox Communications, and Brendan Cosgrove from Kaseya. While the official title of the webinar was Social Customer Service, a more apt title could have been Customer Experience (through Customer Service) is the New Marketing. This point came through loud and clear from all three speakers.

Kate Leggett started things off by sharing some of the research from Forrester Research, Inc. that really helps build the business case for social customer service. Ninety percent of customers surveyed by Forrester Research, Inc. consider customer experience critical to their company’s success with the majority of them believing its importance to be increasing.¹The facts support this feedback.

When there is a positive customer experience, 70% of buyers demonstrate a willingness to make a subsequent purchase²
65% of buyers who had a positive experience are likely to recommend the product or company to others²
The direct effect of a positive customer experience, as measured by additional purchases, reduced churn, and word-of-mouth related sales, has been calculated in the tens of millions, and even billions annually for some industries²
- $31 million for retailers
- $590 million for airlines
- $1.2 billion for wireless service providers
- $1.4 billion for hotels

Given this type of direct financial benefit, one would expect customers are now routinely receiving a positive experience. Surprisingly, only 3% – down from 11% in 2007 – of buyers in 2011 had an outstanding experience. A mere 34% had good experiences.³ This indicates considerable opportunity for companies to differentiate themselves based on delivering outstanding customer experiences.

Lewis Simons continued the conversation by sharing his experience with Cox Communications’ January launch of customer support forums. The company opted to use forums as a vehicle for online support because more than one fourth of its customers had used an online forum in the past year to find information about a product or service. Cox understood that this is a communication channel to which more and more customers are gravitating to get answers.

In just four months, Cox is already seeing two primary benefits from forums. First, it is able to identify issues (that may be shared by multiple customers) faster than with offline methods. And once the issues are uncovered, the company can engage quickly to rapidly resolve issues. Second, customers helping customers (crowdsourcing) extends Cox’s support capability, improving customer experience by delivering answers to questions faster.

Brendan Cosgrove wrapped up the webinar by sharing some of the benefits Kaseya has experienced with its community over the last two years. To begin, Kaseya is more engaged than ever with customers. The company experienced a 300% increase in the number of customers engaged. Often in support communities, companies become concerned with the sentiment of the engagement, expecting it to be negative since most customers in the community are experiencing challenges. However, Kaseya observed that 65% of all discussions, and 85% of the discussions of power users, have a positive sentiment. This is a fantastic result considering that, in general, a large number of discussions receive neutral sentiment.

Kaseya has also benefited from crowdsourcing. Kaseya has seen 14 times more questions being answered in its community without the direct interaction of a Kaseya employee than they have experienced in the past.

Key Takeaways

Online social support communities have the potential to create tremendous value for companies that execute them well. Here are some final words of advice from our webinar speakers:

Be where your customers are (e.g. in online communities, accessible via mobile)
Deliver answers quickly, but make content readily available online (e.g. FAQs, how-to videos)
Integrate community into your overall customer experience strategy (e.g. with traditional support channels)
Listen, engage, be transparent and be personal

¹ Forrester Research, Inc., "Best Practices Framework for Customer Service", 2011, May 26, 2011
² Forrester Research, Inc., "The Business Impact of Customer Experience", 2012, March 26, 2012
³ Forrester Research, Inc., "The Customer Experience Index", 2012, January 23, 2012

Finding the Delicate Balance of Effective Community Moderation

Cecilia Edwards — Wed, 30 May 2012 17:43:00 GMT

Effective moderation can leave a community manager feeling a bit like Goldilocks in search of the perfect bowl of porridge.

Too much moderation can lead to foregoing one of the key benefits of your community – crowdsourcing the answers to your customers’ questions. Too much moderation includes jumping in to immediately answer all questions or deleting posts that you don’t agree with. You end up discouraging your community members from helping each other and actively participating.

Too little moderation can lead to a community that bears no resemblance to the goals or objectives that you laid out when you started your community.

Just Right

Taking a few lessons from some companies that run World Class Communities©, we know that it is possible to find that seemingly elusive mix of “just right.” In general, they seem to start with a clear set of guidelines for their users that are documented, accessible to all members, and enforced.

Have some clear guidance on how to use the forums:

There are many community participation guidelines that appropriately address issues such as staying on topic, not using profanity, and respecting copyright laws. In addition to those, here are a few more to consider:

Include only one topic per thread – This allows everyone in the community to show respect to the post originator by listening. Adding another topic to the thread and steering it off the intended purpose of the originator is the equivalent of butting into a conversation and changing the subject. Since there need not be a limit on the number of forum threads that are started, new thoughts should originate new threads. Encourage members to listen to everyone in the community, not just those who like to interrupt conversations.
Anyone can suggest an answer to a question – Forums are intended to be conversations, therefore, members should feel free to express their opinions and share their experiences. If they feel they have an answer to someone’s question, they should offer it up without worrying about whether or not it is the official answer or 100% correct. This will all get sorted out in the conversation.
Encourage members to acknowledge when their questions have been satisfactorily answered – Closing the loop on the conversation is a great way to encourage continued engagement in the community. The people who asked the question are forced to make a mental note that they have benefited from the community by acknowledging that the answer satisfied their question. Those who answer the question get a sense of appreciation for their efforts. And you, as a community manager, get a better indication of open issues that must be addressed.
Welcome dissenting opinions – In order to establish real relationships people need to have a safe space to express what they really think. That means that they need the to freedom to disagree and provide negative feedback. Your community should be a place where this is welcomed and encouraged because your company will benefit immensely from it. The people who provide negative feedback are those that care enough about your product or service to tell you unpleasant truths that can make it better. However, what is not acceptable are personal attacks on anyone.

What to do when the guidelines aren’t followed:

While it is nice to have a clear set of guidelines, we all know that not everyone will follow the guidelines. In fact, there may be times when even you don’t follow your own guidelines. Therefore, it is important to have a well thought out action plan for when people behave naturally and break the rules or just don’t quite get it right.

A new comment is made that really is the start of a new topic – It is so easy when the conversation is flowing and someone leaves a comment in a forum thread that is a logical tangent of the original post to allow the conversation to naturally move in whatever direction the participant takes it. This, however, is a mistake. Forum discussions are not intended to merely move the face-to-face conversation to the Web. The conversations are memorialized so that others can come back to them and see what has been said on a specific topic. If you find that a new topic has crept into the conversation, go ahead and split the thread into a separate thread so that that topic gets the attention it is due and is discoverable by your members on future visits.
A member of your community suggests an answer that is clearly incorrect – A good host never embarrasses his/her guests. Therefore, as a forum moderator has a bit of a dilemma when someone provides an incorrect answer to a question. Jumping in to provide a correct answer can potentially demotivate others from suggesting answers; yet leaving incorrect information can lead your community members astray. An elegant solution that encourages further suggestions and leads to correct information is for you to first thank the person for their suggestion, and second, ask the community whether anyone else has had a different experience or has a different viewpoint. This will encourage different viewpoints to be shared in a positive manner and enable the correct answer to emerge. If the community doesn't provide the answer, by all means, as one of the participants in the conversation, share the correct answer.
A correct answer has been provided but the person who asked the question hasn't acknowledged it - When someone does something for you, it is polite to recognize them with some form of acknowledgement. In a forum, that means letting others know when an answer they provided solved your problem. As a forum moderator, you care about this because people that are acknowledged have greater motivation to answer more questions. You can ask the person, publicly (preferred) or privately, whether a specific reply resolved their issue. If they say yes, thank the person who provided the answer publicly. This will model the behavior you desire and others will eventually begin to do the same thing, creating a culture of feedback in your forum.

If you get no response, note that the correct answer has been provided. After either you or the original asker of the question verifies their answer has been received, you should close the thread to prevent further discussion. This prevents additional questions from being asked in the thread, and, for those software programs that allow it, better enables you to track questions in your forum that do not have answers.

The expression of dissenting opinions turns into a personal attack - While all of the other tactics mentioned are actually guidelines, this one needs to be a hard limit: absolutely no personal attacks are allowed. If your forum develops a reputation as an “unsafe” place to engage, you ,might as well shut it down. Most people can enjoy a healthy debate, however, almost no one enjoys being insulted. As a moderator, posts that contain insults or attacks are some of the only ones that you must delete. In addition to deleting the post, you should publicly leave a comment about why the post was deleted so that others in the community get the message that attacks are not part of the culture of your forum or community.

Repeat offenders of this hard limit should not be tolerated. As a moderator, you have a few options. You can make it so all of their posts must be moderated prior to showing up to your broader membership. Once you believe they have consistently modified their behavior and have earned the right, you can switch back to having their posts show up in the forum immediately. (I encourage you not to go overboard and moderate your entire community because of the behavior of a few. Address the issue with the few.) If you still have issues, you have the right to ban people from your community as a last resort.

Use your instincts:

There are no doubt many more guidelines you could consider and countless ways your forum members may violate them. The key to remember is to use your instincts when determining your moderation action. Your forum or online community is a group of people engaging with each other regardless of the technology you are using. Were the behavior to take place during a party in your home, how would you react? If it happened during a business meeting in your office what would you do? Use the same social skills and instincts you have already developed in your offline world to help you make good decisions online.

How Communities Allow You to Profitably Scale Your Customer Support

Cecilia Edwards — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 18:15:00 GMT

Customer support is a very common use case for online communities, because, if done correctly, there are tremendous benefits that can be gained. Just think, when your customers have an issue, what better way is there to build a better relationship than to resolve it for them?

The challenge comes in working to profitably scale a high-touch model where knowledgeable people can readily assist in addressing the wide array of topics your customers might have questions about. These questions could be related to your product, its use, and any related product or service that might be used in conjunction with it.

Communities are well suited to rise to the scalability challenge of customer support since they provide several key benefits:

1. Customers are accustomed to and expect to be able to find information via search

A good portion of the vast array of knowledge that is accessible inside your organization can be made available in the community for customers to read on their own time.
Public discussions – that previously took place privately – can be made available to read through search for customers with similar issues.

2. Customers and partners can “join your support team” to resolve issues

Your customers have a shared experience and unique knowledge that your organization doesn't have – the experience of being one of your customers. They can share their experiences, things they have tried, work-arounds that have been successful for them, knowledge of products used in conjunction with yours but come from a third party. This perspective greatly enhances the customer experience when they share it by commenting on and answering each other’s questions.
If your customers use any vendors to implement, service, or support the use of your products, then those vendors have a vested interest in providing your customers support through a community. While it is typically frowned upon for blatant selling to take place in a support community, vendors often find it to be a good source for leads by demonstrating their expertise. Yes, references from previous customers are good for encouraging prospects to become customers; gaining first-hand experience of your expertise will take a prospective customers confidence in you to a whole new level.

3. Your support staff’s time can be more efficiently used for questions they must address

Personal questions are best handled through one-on-one interaction with your organization.
Sometimes the resolution to a customer issue requires more than knowledge; it may require action on the part of your company. This could be a replacement, a setting that you have to change, a part that needs to be sent, etc. These issues must still be addressed by your organization without the assistance of the community.
Some issues are just really hard to solve and require extensive troubleshooting or research – your staff will be the primary ones responsible for addressing these issues.

Given these benefits, it is important to staff your support organization appropriately. The staffing formula that you will use is not radically different from one that you would use to size your phone or email support staff. The effects of scale that the community brings, however, will reduce the required headcount. Here are some examples that highlight the scaling effect of community:

How many questions are raised each day? The volume of questions is directly proportionate to the number of staff required. However, with a community, you should expect to receive fewer questions over time since members can search for existing content. If this is not your experience, try analyzing the types of questions you are receiving and determine if there is content that you could add to the community to satisfy the questions that your customers tend to ask the most.
How long does someone have to work to provide an answer? The answer to this question should vary by the mode of support. For questions asked in the community, you should expect the answers to require relatively little work to generate since many will be common issues shared by several customers and many, if not most, will be things that other customers can answer by readily sharing their experiences. This reduces the amount of staff needed to support questions asked in the community. Conversely, you may see that the average amount of time it takes for offline questions to be answered rise since your staff may be dealing with more complex challenges only.
What is the expectation on response time for questions? Obviously, the shorter this time, the more staff you will need. What is also true though is that if this time is too short, you will lose the benefits of having a community. When customers ask a question in a community, they do not expect the response time to be a matter of minutes. If you set that as your goal, only your staff can accomplish that. If you set the time a bit longer, perhaps up to 48 hours, you provide an opportunity for community members – both customers and third-party vendors – to jump in the conversation and potentially prevent your staff from having to respond at all.

When you first launch your support community, you may not see the full scaling benefits, and your staff will likely be very busy – resist the temptation to resolve their business by adding more permanent staff. First, focus on ensuring there is adequate content in the community and encourage customers and third-party vendors to engage. As your company grows, your staff will be able to handle the growing customer support needs in a way that is not only scalable, but is also high-touch and beneficial to your customers.

What Lessons can Online Communities Learn from a Leading Fast Food Chain?

Cecilia Edwards — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 21:15:00 GMT

McDonald’s sells french fries, but doesn’t sell onion rings. Why is that?

There is an urban legend that states the first beloved sweetheart of Ray Kroc, Founder of McDonald’s Corporation, was killed when a huge burlap sack full of onions fell on her and smothered her. From that day forward he vowed never to support the onion industry and only reluctantly allowed chopped onions to be added to McDonald's burgers.

For some reason I don’t think that urban legend is true, but I do believe there is a lesson that online communities (and other businesses) can learn from McDonald’s about both globalization and localization.

First, let’s talk about globalization, since that’s what matters the most when talking about onion rings. The business school legend on why McDonald’s doesn’t sell onion rings as part of their standard menu is that the world’s onion supply is insufficient to support the sale of onion rings in their stores globally. Apparently the potato supply is sufficient enough to ensure that anyone who comes to one of the 33,000+ stores in one of 120+ countries can order a standard french fry. (I know there are some operation issues such as the cost of production, the batter tainting the taste of the oil and the amount of time the onion rings will stay fresh, but for the purposes of this discussion, let’s just focus on the issues related to globalization.)

So what is the lesson related to globalization?

Globalize when there is a common experience expected of your brand.

On more than one occasion when traveling internationally with friends or colleagues, I have witnessed my American travel partners searching for the nearest McDonalds. They do it either when they first arrive as insurance that they will be able to find some familiar food if they don’t like the fair of the country we’re visiting, or if they find themselves in need of a taste of home after several days. There is an expectation of the McDonald’s brand that, anywhere in the world, you should be able to get a burger and fries that is pretty similar to the one you get back in your home country; and for the most part, that expectation is consistently fulfilled.

Do visitors to your community expect to be able to have the same experience when they access it from anywhere in the world?
Do they want to be able to discuss the same issues in China, the United States and Germany?
Is it helpful for them to be able to connect with people from Canada, Egypt and Russia?

If the answer to these questions, or some variation of them, is yes, then you should globalize. Invite members from around the world to engage together in a single location, i.e. community. Allow members to select the language they would like to read the content in and translate it (both the menus and the user-generated content). This allows for everyone to participate in the same community, but in their own language.

But contrary to what was stated earlier, McDonalds does sell onion rings – and that is what we can learn a thing or two from them about localization.

The exact same menu all across the world would severely limit their sales. There are regional differences in the United States – I think there would be an uproar if people in the South couldn’t get their sweet tea – and certainly additional variations exist in other countries. For instance, you can buy onion rings in Turkey, and since they don’t eat beef in India, your hamburger will be substituted for a veggie patty, lamb, or chicken.

Why would McDonald’s violate their strategy to add something that is not on the global menu in one country and delete the primary global menu item, the hamburger (over 100,000,000,000 sold), in another country? The answer is simple, because they understand that in order to accomplish their mission – “to be the world's best quick service restaurant experience. Being the best means providing outstanding quality, service, cleanliness, and value, so that we make every customer in every restaurant smile” – they need to localize their approach.

So what is the lesson related to localization?

Focus on the best way to accomplish your mission in the local market instead of repeating the same tactics that worked in other markets.

You can’t just sell a beef hamburger in India and expect the customers to smile. Beer will put a smile on the face of many Germans, and beans and rice will have the people in Costa Rica saying “I’m lovin’ it™.”

What are individuals in this market passionate about? How does that passion relate to your community strategy?
What are the cultural norms that dictate how they interact with one another?
What types of content are they interested in and in what format are they most likely to consume it?

Should I globalize or localize?

The answer to this question for most businesses is going to be that you need to BOTH globalize and localize. It is very difficult to establish a brand or leverage the existing strength of your primary brand in another market if there is no consistency across markets. In McDonald’s-speak, identify your burger and fries.

Next step, learn what it will take to put a smile on the face of the members in the local market and go ahead and embrace serving those onion rings in Turkey.

10 Ways to +1 Your Community this Year

Cecilia Edwards — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 20:55:00 GMT

Long before there was Google+, the concept of +1 was used to address the topic of extraordinary customer service. In 1993, Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles wrote Raving Fans: A Revolutionary Approach to Customer Service. In Raving Fans, Blanchard and Bowles cover three areas: Deciding what you as a business want; Discovering what the customer wants; and delivering plus one.

So what did they mean by delivering plus one. Here are some of the key points they articulate:

Being consistent in your performance to create credibility with your customers
Limiting the number of areas in which you want to make a difference so that you have a chance of doing them well
Promote more service and deliver more (as opposed to under-promise and over-deliver)
Meet expectations first, exceed them second
Be flexible

Since one of the primary reasons to have an externally facing online community is to deepen relationships with your customers, it seems that the +1 concept from Blanchard and Bowles fits well for online communities. Here are 10 suggestions for ways you could +1 your community this year.

Write +1 additional piece of content – we all know that quality content that is regularly refreshed is important to the continued health of a community. While the engagement of community members does create a valuable steady stream of new content, it is no substitute for the occasional piece of content originated by your company. Let your community members hear your voice and see your continued interest in the community by writing something new that is of value to them.
Highlight the accomplishments of +1 of your community members – in order to demonstrate to your members that your community is not just a marketing site where the only thing you promote are the products, services, and accomplishments of your company, make some of the content about them. Think about the purpose of your community, why your members are there in the first place, and identify someone who has benefited from the fulfillment of that purpose. How have they used your products or services in such a way to benefit them? Tell their story – or better yet – find a way to let them tell it.
Publically thank +1 community member for their activities in the community - if you have community members that are engaging in a way that you think is beneficial – they are answering questions of others, commenting, originating content, sharing valuable information, and demonstrating the culture you desire – then thank them. People love acknowledgement and it is sure to provide some level of motivation for them to continue. Others who see your public acknowledgement will also be encouraged to follow suite.
Take +1 poll on ways to improve the community – asking people their opinions is a great way to increase their level of connectedness to your community. It says that you care about what they think and the kind of experience you would like them to have. You benefit because it gives you a perspective into the thinking of your members and can help you prioritize your investments in the community in a more impactful manner.
Implement +1 idea in the community based upon poll results – it’s great that you asked people what they would like to see changed in the community. Now it’s time to act upon it. If your members feel they can have some level of influence over the community because they see visible evidence, their loyalty to the community will increase (and so should their opinion of you.) With that increased loyalty ought to come increased spending on your products and services over time.
Personally invite +1 additional person to join your community – while it is always great for people to find your community through search or advertisements, it is even better when someone personally invites them. The specific recommendation of the community from one of the members has a much greater impact on someone’s likelihood to visit, join and engage in your community. Don’t just leave the personal invitations up to your community members though. Jump in and call or email someone you know to join in.
Greet +1 new community member – designing your community so that it is easy for newcomers to engage and developing welcome guides are both great ways to make sure that your new members can easily jump in the conversation. It is even better is someone notices they are there and gives them a personal greeting. Many communities have automated tools to help enable this – things like a default welcome message and an automatic friend. The problem with relying solely on these things is that everyone knows they are automated and therefore no one feels that anything was done specifically to welcome them personally. Take the time to make a connection with a new member, comment on something they did, ensure they get an answer to their question, ask them something about themselves, or just generally connect in a way that is personal.
Share +1 thing off topic – you are an interesting person and your members might want to know something about your interest other than business. This is why companies have baseball teams and office parties. They want to increase the trust among their employees through non-business related sharing. Don’t tell them what you had for lunch – unless of course it was something unique enough to be of broad interest (like the time some of my colleagues and I went to dinner at an exotic food restaurant and the table was spread with zebra, wildebeest, wild boar, and a salad topped with locust and crickets – that was worth the pictures and a bit of the story due to the general weirdness of it all.) Instead, share something that lots of people might have some interest in and feel like commenting on or sharing.
Find +1 community member to give some administrative rights to – managing your community is a big job that can consume a lot of someone’s time. However, there is a good chance that you have at least one member that is passionate about an area of your community that you would trust to help you with moderation and topic leadership. Give that person the right to lead. This will make them stronger advocates for your community and give you additional resources – at no cost – to stay on top of all of the community management tasks.
Host +1 online event- while most of the engagement that takes place in an online community is asynchronous, community engagement can be energized with an occasional synchronous event in which members can plan to “meet” as specific times to discuss a topic. Online chats can increase the velocity of engagement. Video casts will allow people to both see and hear each other resulting in the formation of new and deeper relationships among members.

In the spirit of this post, I just couldn’t stop at 10 suggestions. Here’s a +1 suggestion:

Host +1 live off-line event – in the spirit of +1, here is an extra suggestion: while online events are good for deepening relationships, offline events can take those relationships to even greater levels. It is important to remember that the technology should not confine the engagement of your community. Humans are social beings and in one hour of face to face interaction can shave months of relationship building time off of online communications only.

As an added bonus – if you haven’t read Raving Fans or haven’t read it in a while, here is a mind map of the Raving Fans book.

What ideas do you have to +1 your community?

5 Steps to Ensure Your Members Don’t Run Away With Your Community

Cecilia Edwards — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 16:06:00 GMT

A Best Practice of World Class Communities is to Encourage Ownership of the Community by Members

One of the strategies Telligent encourages for building World Class Communities is to encourage a level of ownership of the community by its members. There are several benefits associated with this:

People tend to support the things they feel they have ownership of
The cost of managing the community can be lowered with community volunteers
Community members can often be more ardent supporters of the community rules and also more effective evangelists of your products than employees

This usually works well because the interest of the community members is in alignment with those of the company sponsoring the community. The following chart is an example of the typical types of things both a set of customers and a company would be focused on:

The key is ensuring that the community's interest stays aligned with the interest of the company that is funding the community, otherwise there is a problem.

Sometimes, Community Ownership can Turn into a Community Hijacking

Just after Christmas, Steve Pavlina closed down the forums on his site after five years. You can read his blog post about it here. These forums appear to have grown into a very successful community, with community user numbers that would be envied by most. He had over 48,000 registered users who posted about a million messages across 67,000 threads. About 400 of his users were very active on the site and several were part of his volunteer moderation team, and yet he still shut them down.

Pavlina shared that his original objective for the forums was to create a space where growth-oriented people could come together to help each other in a positive support environment, and for a while that is exactly what he had. However, over time, many of the community members started to develop what Pavlina labeled as ‘a sense of entitlement’ and they began breaking the rules. They routinely annoyed other members and promoted their own businesses and affiliate programs. The final straw was when some of the volunteer moderators – his trusted power users – joined in the dysfunction. In other words, the vision for the community was lost. As a result, he shut down the forums.

5 Steps You Can Take to Avoid This

There are a number of things that can be learned from Steve Pavlina’s experience that can help you avoid having the same thing happen to your community:

Work with a set of founding community members, or power users, if your community is already well established. Also create what Fever Bee’s Richard Millington calls a “Community Constitution”. This constitution should include a statement of the community’s purpose, beliefs, and governance approach (the consequences of violating the constitution). Having a set of members that assists with crafting the constitution helps to create ready defenders of it as well.
In addition to the constitution, the community manager should create a community guide that informs new members how to get started, describes the intended culture and explains a bit about the history of the community. This can set the stage for new member engagement and serve as a tool that moderators can point constitution violators to as a reminder of acceptable behavior.
There must be strict enforcement of the guidelines – no exceptions allowed. If a community member hasn’t already done it, moderators should publically provide feedback on inappropriate behavior so the entire community learns what will and will not be tolerated. Additionally, public thanks should be given to community members when they call other members out on violations of the community guidelines and culture.
The community manager has an opportunity to gently steer the direction of the community by initiating discussions and posting content that is of interest to the broader community and in alignment with the community's vision. Having an editorial calendar and executing on it will ensure a steady stream of relevant content that is aligned with your company’s objectives.
Establishing and maintaining good relationships with the influencers in the community is critical. As mentioned above, community members can be both better enforcers of your rules and champions of your cause than you can. Do what it takes to ensure you stay connected to those with the most influence in your community, and be sure to solicit both their input and help when needed.

Successfully Implementing an Online Community is a Team Effort

Cecilia Edwards — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 20:15:00 GMT

After you have done the necessary steps to build and deploy a successful online community, there’s still one thing left to do – make sure that your community team is in place.

It takes more than just one person to build and maintain a community; it takes a team effort to successfully implement an online community. Numerous people in your company will be involved in the process, but the number of people will greatly depend on factors such as the structure and objectives of the community and the unique element of your company.

Regardless of whether you are creating a community for a Fortune 500 company or a non-profit organization, there are four team positions that should always be filled.

Let’s take a more in-depth look at each of these positions:

Owner – Develops the strategy, cares for the community and is also measured on the success of the community. Your IT department may be involved in the deployment of your community; however, a more successful model for ownership comes from the business side.
Sponsor –A senior executive who is committed to using community to execute corporate strategy. Try to think of someone who is a strong leader, has a strategic eye and understands how to interweave community into the corporate strategy.
Champion – Who are those two or three people who consistently evangelize your online community in your organization? They should be your champions. Let them spread positivity about the community and get people involved.
Community Manager – Lead social capital builder. Evangelist. Responder. Rule enforcer. Spam controller. These are all characteristics of the community manager. Initially this individual’s role is to establish the culture of the community. However, over time, the community manager’s role will shift to engaging and enabling influencers in the community and serving as the champion of the community within the company. Speaking of community managers, let me introduce you ours – Jenn Emerson. She does a fantastic job running our community and understands what it takes to be a successful community manager.

As you study the definition of each position, who do you think would be the ideal individual(s) to carry the title for each role at your company? It may be challenging at first to identify someone for each position, but it is essential to assign a name to each of the roles.

Find out more specifics of what each role in the community team entails by downloading our whitepaper, Strategies for Building World Class Communities.

Social Media & Associations: Moving Forward by Getting Back to the Basics

Cecilia Edwards — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 20:30:00 GMT

In the recent newsletter that Association Trends™ published, there was an article titled “Social media and how it’s changing associations.” This article focused on the theme of the recent ASAE 2012 Technology Conference, which was how to integrate a social media strategy into an association’s corporate culture. Social continues to be a growing trend, and it is starting to pick up in popularity among associations.

Chris Carfi, VP of Social Business Strategy at Ant’s Eye View, discussed what he felt were the five different levels of engagement:

Traditional phase of one-way communication
Experimental phase of dabbling without a connection to business operations
Operational phase that is embedded in business operations
Measurable stage that drives business results
Full engagement phase where social as part of the DNA

There is a nice parallel between these levels of engagement and the three layers in the Social Ecosystem. Telligent has classified three different layers of engagement in the social space, which includes not only social media, but company-owned communities as well.

Participating: The participating layer is where individuals and the company can participate on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Carfi’s first two levels of engagement take place here. Sometimes this manifests itself as “dabbling” in social media, but it does not connect to business objectives. However, companies in Cafri’s third stage could also use this as an effective means to draw people to their communities.
Managed: This layer includes organization pages and groups on consumer-facing social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook. As described in Carfi’s operational level of engagement, social media is embedded into business operations; but interaction does not take place on a platform that is owned by the organization.
Owned: The third layer of the Social Ecosystem, classified as company-owned and managed, typically running on community and collaboration software. This is where the greatest value takes place from Carfi’s final two stages of engagement – measurable and full engagement. It is only in the context of a company-owned community, where an organization can fully own the data to both measure and drive business results. And, it is only in this context where there can be full integration with the company’s overall business processes, branding and control of the user experience.

Justin Couto of Couto Solutions summed this idea up nicely in our recent webinar with AICPA. Regarding how and where associations spend time and resources on social media, he says “The smartest investment you can make is in your organization.” It’s wise to capitalize on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter; however, remember that the social media landscape is ever-changing. The social networks that are popular today may not be in six months, a year or five years. Use these as social channels to attract and drive your focus audience into a community that truly fulfills their needs.

For more information about how associations use online social communities, watch this webinar featuring Couto Solutions and AICPA.

Tyler Tech Gets Social with Clients to Enable Customer-Driven Support

Cecilia Edwards — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 11:00:00 GMT

Tyler Technologies, a leading provider of software and services for local governments, is bringing governance into the modern day with technology that helps more than 10,000 local government entities improve day-to-day operations.

Cities, counties, schools and other government entities in all 50 U.S. states, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Canada, Puerto Rico and the United Kingdom rely on Tyler Technologies to streamline and automate operations to improve governmental efficiency.

Tyler Tech wanted to provide its clients an open, easily-accessible support community to troubleshoot software issues and collaborate with peers. By acquiring an online community from Telligent, its clients can find peer-to-peer support online 24/7.

Plus, clients can offer product feedback and ideas that Tyler Tech can incorporate into its solutions for continuous, measureable improvement on its products.

Tyler Tech Enables customer-driven support with its online community.

This level of engagement and interaction among employees and clients increases the overall value of using a Tyler Tech solution. The improved support experience also translates to higher levels of client satisfaction and increased brand advocates who champion the value of Tyler Tech’s software. Read more about Tyler Tech’s success and social initiatives.

Driving Adoption is the Seed to Growing Your Community

Cecilia Edwards — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 20:30:00 GMT

You have incorporated community objectives into your company’s plan, designed the community to foster member ownership and finally launched your very own community – so now what?

Well, that’s a great start; however you are not at the finish line yet. After the preliminary push to launch the community is complete, you must then shift your focus to a continuous effort to drive adoption. This is a three-step process, which includes:

• Driving traffic to the site
• Encouraging engagement
• Enabling members to become evangelists for the community

First let’s talk traffic. So what can you do to drive traffic to your community? The answer is simple – all the same types of marketing activities you would engage in to drive traffic anywhere. Things such as:

• Marketing campaigns
• Social media campaigns
• SEO-related efforts

So now let’s say that you have mastered the art of driving traffic to your community – how will engagement begin?

The community manager is vital in making this happen. First, he/she will need to engage personally with members. Second, and just as important, the community manager must act as the liaison between the community and the company to ensure that a constant stream of new, fresh and relevant content is pouring into the community and that company employees are engaging and revisiting the community as well.

Engaged members make the best evangelist for your community. Therefore, it is important to design your community in a way that best equips your members to spread the word. Questions that give them an opportunity to provide public feedback, polls, and functionality that allows them to easily share with others outside the community are all examples of ways you can help your members rave about your community.

It is also worth noting here the importance of your continued participation in the other social networks that you were utilizing prior to building your community. So if you tweet or regularly post on Facebook, continue to do those things. Remember that prior to launching your community, the social ecosystem was already buzzing with individuals who were engaging in topics of interest to your organization. Participating in these online avenues where engagement is already taking place is one of the most efficient ways to build both reputation and interest in your community.

The potential for your community is endless. However, nothing just happens overnight; first you must dedicate time and take the proper steps to drive adoption.

Find out more about how you can drive adoption, by downloading our latest whitepaper, Strategies for Building World Class Communities.

Execute Your Community Strategy In Waves

Cecilia Edwards — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 22:25:00 GMT

The first to market, the first one with the answer, or the first one to accomplish a goal are all things that people aspire to be. Finding people who are eager to be the first one to arrive at a meeting, the first one to try someone’s newest food dish, or the first one to express an opinion in a community they do not own is far more rare.

It takes effort to be first in a community – no real culture has visibly been established, so you have to think hard about the appropriate way to contribute. It takes risk – there is no assurance that what you are contributing is on point, whether others will respond in a manner that is personally damaging to your reputation, or whether there will even be any return (a good conversation, increased reputation, a sign of gratitude, etc.) on your investment of time. So why be first?

Those starting new communities are caught in a real Catch-22 – you need people to be engaged in order for people to engage in your community. Fortunately, there is a solution that lies in how you plan your launch.

By personally soliciting a number of early adopters, you can significantly reduce the risk of creating yet another ghost town community.

I think about launching a community in a series of three waves:

Wave 1: The first wave of people that should be recruited to the community are the “Ambassadors”. You should choose 5 – 10 people that you can ask directly to be the first people into your community. Share with them your objectives and vision for the community and ask them, for a very specific timeframe, to engage in your new community in the manner in which you would like to see everyone engage in the future. This wave should start the establishment of a culture and tone for your community.

Wave 2: A second wave of 150 – 200 people should be recruited to further the work of the Ambassadors. These “Champions” should be asked to follow the lead of the Ambassadors in their engagement. Again, for a defined period of time, they should ask questions, leave comments, connect with each other, and provide feedback on the community itself. At the end of this wave there should be a sufficient amount of community generated content so that people new to the community will feel a significant amount of engagement and reduced risk of engagement.

In identifying people for these first two waves, it won’t hurt to keep in mind the three categories of people identified by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point as necessary to the spread of movements. Since the ultimate goal of launching a community is to get it to the point where there is a level of self-sustaining engagement and continual growth, companies will typically be able to spot the tipping point at which this happens. Gladwell suggests that the required mix of people to reach this point includes:

Connectors – people who act as conduits between others, help connect people and cross fertilize relationships
Mavens – people who are compelled to help others make good decisions
Salesmen – those who can be persuasive in inducing decisions or behaviors of others

Wave 3: By the time you reach your third wave of recruitment, which is the public launch, if your Ambassadors and Champions have accomplished their tasks, new members should be able to readily spot the culture, have a clear indication of how to engage, and have minimal fear of any negative repercussions of contributing.

Catch-22 resolved.

Download our latest white paper, Strategies for Building World Class Communities, to learn more.

Community Design: An Important Element in Building a World Class Community

Cecilia Edwards — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 22:15:00 GMT

How does peer support and social identity relate to building a community? These two elements are what researchers believe are likely motivations for continued community participation among users. While gathering information is often a key driver for initially getting members to a community, this is not what will keep them coming back and becoming active participants. When launching a successful community, companies need to act more like facilitators than as dictatorial owners. Listen to what the users like and want, then play the facilitating role as they build and grow the community.

So now, let’s talk objectives. With any new venture, whether it is starting a new social media network to try to become the next start-up sensation or something as simple as creating a new app for the iPhone – you have to have an objective. You set an objective for your venture and also for the people who will be using what you are creating. The same goes for building a community. Two sets of objectives must be managed in online communities: 1) those of the company and 2) those of the members. If this worries you, don’t let it. Managing this balance is simplified because the two sides usually have very complementary objectives.

According to research by McMillan and Chivas in Sense of Community: A Definition and Theory, people’s sense of community is determined by four elements:

Membership
Influence
Integration and fulfillment of needs
Shared emotional connection

Members want to feel as if they belong and as if they matter. They want to feel as if they are making a difference and they want to sense that their needs will be met through the group. These are just a few of the key messages that McMillan and Chivas conveyed in their work. This study supports that notion that relationships are a critical enabler in a community for meeting business objectives. However before any deep relationship can begin to form, an emotional connection has to form first. Once an emotional connection is formed, they become passionate evangelists for the company’s brand, whom others are willing to listen to and follow in their footsteps. It’s really simple math; this equation demonstrates what happens:

Community Members + Emotional Connection = Fierce Community Supporters

Given all of this, a key factor in building a world class community is to design the community to foster that sense of community. Here are some examples of how to do that.

Allow members to affect the type of content by featuring materials highly rated or viewed by members versus what you company thinks is most important.
Provide a channel for members to exert their influence on the direction of a community by establishing an advisory board, polling members for their opinions and then executing on the feedback given.
Meet a broader spectrum of members needs than what is core to your company’s interest by adding content from other sources, providing places in the community for expanded discussions, or allowing community members to provide some of the community leadership.

Companies that design their communities in this way have stronger, more sustainable communities that are better able to fulfill the company’s objectives.

Planning for the User’s Second Visit is Necessary for Building a World Class Community

Cecilia Edwards — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 22:46:00 GMT

Building a world class community requires that you plan for the user’s second visit. Users will come the first time to have a specific information need met. They will come back a second and subsequent time if they can engage in community activities.

When companies are launching communities, they need to think beyond the initial visit and think about how they can ensure that users come back again. They need to figure out how they can allow visitors to see that there are other people that they can engage with around their common interest and that there are people with whom relationships can be formed with over subsequent visits. All communities, even those with a primary business objective of providing customer support, should have the same goal of repeat visits – even when everything related to the product or service is fine.

If you put yourself in the shoes of your prospective member, a wide range of possibilities open up. Try asking:

What do they do with my product/service once they purchase it?
What interests them? What passions do they have related to my company’s offering?
What pains do they experience on a regular basis?
How could they benefit from being in a relationship with others like them?

I can only imagine that the people at Fiskars asked themselves these types of questions when they created their community of “Fiskateers". This global manufacturer of the trademarked orange-handled scissors focused their community on a passion of many of their customers – crafting. By enabling crafters to establish relationships in their community and foster the sharing of ideas and tips, Fiskars was able to realize significant business benefits and become the owner of one of the most effective “fan communities” in practice. They reportedly have:

Significantly reduced Fiskars’ advertising expenses
Increased chatter around their brand by 600%
Generated 13 new product ideas per month
Increased sales 300%

Fiskars was able to achieve these results not because they asked for direct feedback about issues people had with their scissors and other cutting instruments. They achieved these results because they focused on the second visit – the establishment of community. This is just an overview of the importance of getting your users to come back a second time; additional tactics that can be used to encourage repeat visits are highlighted in the first white paper in this series.

Your community’s blueprint should include a picture of success

Cecilia Edwards — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 17:19:00 GMT

How do you define success? Depending on who you ask that question to, success may have a different meaning. If you ask a bakery magazine publisher, the response may be that success is measured by the number of subscriptions. If you ask the museum curator, their success may be measured by the number of visitors that enter their doors each day. Truthfully, it’s different for every person, every company and every industry.

However, when it comes to building world class communities, success is more than just a goal for the number of members you would like to see in the community or the number of page views you would like to get. An effective picture of success for a world class community correlates to the overall business objectives and provides a clear guide for evaluating whether those objectives have been met.

When illustrating a picture of success, there are four key questions that should be top of mind. By answering these questions, they will help you to develop a clear picture of success and they have the potential to influence the design of the community. These questions include:

What existing processes need to improve for the community to be successful?
By taking a deep dive into the process of each facet of your company – ranging from market research to support – you can find ways to improve business processes across your organization.

What capabilities does the company need to establish to support this new way of engagement?
Does your company’s human resources and marketing departments need a way to collaborate across departments? Or maybe you have no way to obtain feedback and need to institute a mechanism in order to do so. You are not alone because companies such as Long Realty faced the same challenges and developed an answer to this question early.

What are the specific outcomes your company needs to achieve for the effort to be worth the investment?
This could pertain to something as simple as finding a way to establish faster support. Or the issue can be a little more complex, such as your revenue has been down the last 2 years and you need a way to turn things around and increase revenue.

What feedback can the company solicit that would be most beneficial?
In order to understand where you are lacking and where you can improve, every company needs feedback. Feedback can range from gaining greater responsiveness from analysts to receiving increased customer satisfaction.

Once you have effectively developed a picture for success by answering the questions above and the community has launched, there is a set of metrics that can be applied to aid in community management. These metrics include:

Web metrics
Engagement metrics
Buzz and sentiment metrics
Community makeup metrics

The key thing to note is that you should start developing what you envision success to be at an early stage. If the answer to any of the above questions is not crystal clear, then it’s time to take a fresh look at your definition of success and start developing your picture of success. By developing a picture of success early and by applying the right set of metrics, you are well on your way to building your very own world class community.

Get your sewing needle out–it’s time to weave community objectives into the core of your company

Cecilia Edwards — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 21:00:00 GMT

Business objectives are a key aspect to any company. Therefore, it is important to keep in mind that business objectives for a community must be established at a strategic level within the organization. The more aligned your community’s business objectives are to the company’s overall objectives and value proposition, the greater the potential for benefit and return.

Now you may be thinking to yourself, how exactly can your company identify powerful business objectives for the community? A focus on a few essential questions is helpful:

How can online community support your company’s differentiators?
What are the top strategic objectives of the senior leadership in your company?
What are the company’s core values?

Answering these questions can lead to business objectives that are substantive for internal, employee-facing communities and external, public-facing communities.

Examples of business objectives for internal communities include:

Attracting and retaining new employees
Capturing and utilizing tacit knowledge
Breaking down departmental silos and increasing collaboration
Creating an empowered workforce
Increasing innovation
Creating a more customer-centric culture
Driving sales by empowering employees with real-time market intelligence

Examples of business objectives for external communities include:

Leveraging the expertise of the workforce to gain credibility in the marketplace
Becoming the definite place to come to for information
Improving market responsiveness
Establishing strong ties with customers

A prime example of a company that is interweaving community objectives into its strategic objectives is Psion, a 31-year-old ruggedized handheld device manufacturer based in London. Psion uses its online community, IngenuityWorking, as the primary avenue to realize the CEO’s strategic vision: to invite customers and partners to work with the company to improve product performance, customization, support and marketing. IngenuityWorking has become a key enabler of Psion’s corporate strategy; the community hosts approximately 13,000 registered members; 50,000 monthly visitors; 6,000 discussions and 1,000 distinct technology articles. Now, the community receives more hits than the company’s website and Psion outperformed its 2009 revenue and operating profit.

World class communities are not constructed overnight. It takes time, strategic thinking, and an effective plan. Making sure that your organization is linking community objectives to corporate objectives is just one stepping stone and is the first of seven key components that I will share with you.

Webinar Recap: Secrets to Building Sustainable Online Communities

Cecilia Edwards — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 18:19:00 GMT

To those who joined our webinar last week, we thank you very much for your time. I hope you left with practical, action-oriented insights to help you transform your community from stale to effective. If you weren't able to attend the webinar or would like to see it again on-demand, you can download the complete recording and the presentation slides.

During this informative webinar, founder and CTO Rob Howard covered the following five important steps to building a sustainable online community:

1. Create value by listening.

Why are businesses using social technology? There are several reasons. First, social technology is the new norm, the way that people expect organizations to do business. Second, organizations are realizing that they can create internal and external value through the use of social technologies. Third, organizations are shifting their mentality toward data-driven decision making. And fourth, organizations are using social technology to understand and leverage peer-driven decisions.

2. Define a community strategy.

Organizations struggle with this step. They understand community technology but want to know the ROI. The key is to create a strategy first, for a particular audience, or you will overwhelm yourself considering the technology. Determine your audience, then goals and objectives, then formulate your strategy, solutions, and results. Each one depends on the previous.

For example, if your audience is your prospects, and your goal is to turn those prospects into customers, your strategy is digital marketing with forums, blogs and wikis. But if your audience is your customers, you will more likely need support, search, and so on. Your strategy will involve security, workflow and reputation, with widgets, extensibility, and APIs.

A strategy must be defined, whether external or internal. Common use cases for internal deployments include: empowering employees, connecting people, supporting a globally distributed workforce, and leading with business innovation.

3. Understand the community life cycle.

Understanding the community life cycle can help you avoid making major mistakes. There are four main stages in the community life cycle: on-board, established, mature, and mitosis. It is important to know that within and between the stages are smaller life cycles, and communities can (and should) repeat and fluctuate between stages.

4. Know the three cardinal sins.

All three can cause a community to fail.

Build it, and they will come.
Launched and done.
More is better.

5. Measure, analyze, and improve.

In order to be successful, an organization must understand user engagement both inside and outside of the community. There are three different types of metrics: web analysis, social analytics, and social intelligence. The type of analytics you run depends upon your organization's objectives and where your community is in the life cycle.

We got a lot of great questions at the conclusion of the webinar. We're working on answering them and will post those upon completion.

To learn more about the community life cycle and the three cardinal sins, read Rob Howard's Mashable article.

Watch the webinar recording and download the slides.

Review of "How Governments are Harnessing the Value of Community and Collaborative Technologies: A Haiti Case Study" Webinar on June 23

Cecilia Edwards — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 14:58:00 GMT

I had the pleasure of moderating a webinar last Wednesday: How Governments are Harnessing the Value of Community and Collaborative Technologies: A Haiti Case Study. Telligent founder and CTO Rob Howard made this presentation at the Gov 2.0 show last month, and he received such an overwhelming response that we decided to repeat it as a webinar to ensure everyone that wanted had an opportunity to see it.

Regardless of your line of business, you are sure to find the information Rob presented insightful. For those engaged in disaster relief, the relevance is clear. The way the military responded and supported the coordination of the more than 300 military, government and NGO responders has forever changed the way humanitarian assistance and disaster relief will occur.

Other government entities will be able to relate to how the technology was used to engage a broad range of stakeholders, both inside and outside formal organizations, and to analyze the unstructured data generated into useful, actionable knowledge. Rob makes clear parallels to the private sector as he explains how corporations are similarly engaged with their customers through support communities.

More specifically, during the webinar, he shared the APAN (All Partners Access Network) story to demonstrate how US and international government organizations are utilizing community software to more efficiently and securely augment the free flow of information to government personnel and other approved parties across the globe.

After Hurricane Katrina, the US learned some very tough lessons around the impact that coordination - or the lack thereof - can have on the lives of many during disasters. In response to those lessons, the military was in the planning stages of developing better communication and coordination processes when the earthquake struck Haiti. Understanding that people's lives cannot wait for final plans when faced with a disaster, APAN was launched within 24 hours of the earthquake, a full 10 months ahead of schedule.

While the magnitude of the loss in Haiti is unimaginable, there is no doubt that lives were saved and aid was more effectively delivered because of the improved collaboration of the first responders. As technology, processes, and the ability to analyze and learn from past experiences improve, there is no doubt that the US and the world will be better able to respond to the needs of those impacted by disasters in the future.

If you have not yet viewed the webinar, read the APAN success story or watched the short video, I encourage you to do so. If you have done those things, I challenge you to think of ways you can use community and collaboration technologies in your organization or industry to drive change for the better.

Follow-up for "Product Portfolio: Overview & Demos" Webinar on February 18, 2010

Cecilia Edwards — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:48:00 GMT

To those who joined our webinar on Thursday, we thank you very much for your time. I hope you found the information that Rob Howard presented to be useful in helping you see how you can listen to and engage customers through Telligent Community, increase employee productivity and interactions with Telligent Enterprise, and measure and understand user engagement with Telligent Analytics. If you didn't attend the webinar or you would like to see it again on-demand, watch the complete recording.

In this post, we will provide both an overview of the new enhancements to our products and the answers to questions asked during the live webinar.

The common themes that run across all three new products versions are:

Enhanced quality and performance
Increased ease of developing and integrating with other applications
Flexibility and adoption-driven enhancements

Telligent Community 5.5 allows you to capture richer profile data and makes it easier to contribute content.

Telligent Enterprise 2.5 makes it easier to execute on the factors that drive user adoption.

Telligent Analytics 3.5 (available in March 2010) makes it simpler to understand, create and share reports.

Read more detailed information about the enhancements and changes in these products. The Telligent Evolution Platform Software Development Kit that provides tools and examples of how to extend Telligent Community and Telligent Enterprise will be available in March 2010.

Questions & Answers

We are a global company in many countries. What languages does your application support?
Are you doing anything to compete with commenting providers like Echo or Disqus to socialize your commenting more?
Is Four Roads the only provider you know of doing Facebook Connect integration? Are you planning on integrating it with the product yourself?
Rob demonstrated a mobile viewer. Is that included with Telligent Community and Telligent Enterprise? Or the Telligent Evolution Platform SDK? Or was that a sample application built using the REST API? Can Rob discuss the Telligent mobile strategy? Are there any plans?
What support is provided for SharePoint 2007?
How does document synchronization work?
How does Telligent compare to SharePoint 2010?
Are there more business cases to describe how Telligent has been used in the enterprise?
Did Telligent publish anything detailing the changes introduced in the new product versions?
How does email integration work?
Where can I read more about the web services APIs and your SDK?

1. We are a global company in many countries. What languages does your application support?

Telligent's platform was built to support all languages and also fully supports right-to-left layouts. For example, one of our global customers recently launched a community in 35 different languages, including Arabic. And, as discussed during the webinar, Telligent's platform powers a number of Dell's communities, including the Direct2Dell Japan blog.

2. Are you doing anything to compete with commenting providers like Echo or Disqus to socialize your commenting more?

Telligent believes that integrated information management and analytics are key drivers for organizations to deploy a community and collaboration platform, and while the aforementioned technologies are very useful, they contribute to the creation of silos of critical customer feedback. Telligent introduced socialization of discussions by enabling forum-based interactions that can be easily embedded in other Web sites.

3. Is Four Roads the only provider you know of doing Facebook Connect integration? Are you planning on integrating it with the product yourself?

Telligent has other customers and partners who are using Facebook Connect to integrate with our platform. Because of the richness of the Telligent Evolution Platform APIs, there are countless applications that can integrate with the Telligent platform. The work done by our partners, such as Four Roads, is and will continue to be invaluable in bringing to the market a wide range of application integrations that meet the needs of our customers.

4. Rob demonstrated a mobile viewer. Is that included with Telligent Community and Telligent Enterprise? Or the Telligent Evolution Platform SDK? Or was that a sample application built using the REST API? Can Rob discuss the Telligent mobile strategy? Are there any plans?

The mobile application Rob mentioned during the webinar represents what can be done with the platform through the REST API. Telligent recognizes that mobile is becoming a more important strategy for enterprises interested in ensuring their audiences are able to collaborate, connect, and communicate wherever they are and will be a key theme for Telligent in 2010.

5. What support is provided for SharePoint 2007?

Telligent has offered support for SharePoint 2007 starting with Telligent Enterprise 2.0.

Web Parts - Bring best-of-breed collaboration tools into the SharePoint environment.
Document Synchronization - Benefit from document management through SharePoint, with social and user-centered collaboration in Telligent. Attachments in emails sent to Telligent forums can also be captured and stored in SharePoint document libraries.
Native Microsoft Integration - Both SharePoint and Telligent share a common base platform: Microsoft .NET. Furthermore, Telligent offers rich profile integration with Microsoft Active Directory and Microsoft Exchange Server.
Activity Streams - Interactions within SharePoint, such as changes or additions to documents, are published on the Activity Stream within Telligent. You can also include an Activity Stream Web Part in SharePoint to keep track of all the collaborative activities occurring in Telligent products.

In March 2010, Telligent will release the next version of the Telligent Evolution Platform SDK which will contain source code to all Web Parts.

6. How does document synchronization work with SharePoint? Is it limited to SharePoint 2010?

Document synchronization lets you connect a media gallery on Telligent Community or Telligent Enterprise with a document library in SharePoint 2007. As files change within SharePoint, community participants always see the latest version, enabling document management by administrators or subject matter experts without disrupting the content consumers' experience. Support for SharePoint 2010 will be available when SharePoint 2010 becomes publicly available.

7. How does Telligent compare to SharePoint 2010?

Telligent focuses on collaboration, connection, and the elimination of information silos through flexible information access and expert search. For companies who have advanced document and content management needs, Telligent products continue to provide integration with their existing or new IT investments, one of which could be SharePoint 2007 or the upcoming SharePoint 2010 version. Telligent is committed to continuing to provide the best-of-breed and innovative capabilities that our customers expect.

8. Are there more business cases to describe how Telligent has been used in the enterprise?

Telligent customers are finding ways to use Telligent Enterprise that are in alignment with all the ways in which they do business. Organizations can:

Increase the usefulness of data shared throughout an organization by turning it into knowledge
Minimize knowledge loss as employees transition in, out, and around the organization
Connect geographically dispersed workforces
Increase employee productivity and satisfaction by mirroring the new and evolving communication habits and needs of the workforce
Eliminate information silos by enabling collaboration within teams, departments, or across the entire organization
Enable interactive and transparent corporate communications
Increase the bonds between employees and loyalty to the company through virtual water cooler opportunities
Streamline employee on-boarding and training

9. Did Telligent publish anything detailing the changes introduced in the new product versions?

Yes, please see the release notes for Telligent Community and Telligent Enterprise. Once Telligent Analytics 3.5 is publicly available, we will share detailed release notes about the improvements made.

10. How does email integration work?

Telligent's email integration is a powerful capability that ensures people use the technology that is most familiar to them. Email can continue to be used for collaboration through distribution lists, and 100 percent of the content and files are captured. This ensures that the content is searchable, can be run through Telligent Analytics, associated with users, and can further be integrated and managed through a document management system (such as SharePoint). The email integration can run natively integrated with Microsoft Exchange or can run separately in order to integrate with nearly any email technology.

11. Where can I learn more about the Web services APIs? What about an SDK?

The Telligent Evolution Platform APIs are available as REST-based Web services and are delivered both with the Telligent Evolution Platform and within the Telligent Evolution Platform SDK, which is released more often than platform releases. You can download and use the current version of the Telligent Evolution Platform SDK today or read more about the APIs in the Telligent developer documentation. The next version of the Telligent Evolution Platform SDK, which will be available in March 2010, will include additional samples and details for developers extending the Telligent Evolution platform.