What are Branded Community Best Practices?

The eMarketer newsletter (November 10, 2010) called my attention to this study from ComBlu. It is a careful analysis of 241 branded communities. As you might expect, these are leaders by definition, and the report finds 33% of them to be High Performers, but none Stellar Performers (p. 8). That says that most of us are likely on the sidelines or in the very early stages of building a branded community.

Radian6 has a publication for those who are considering or experimenting. It has lots of good ‘how to’ info that is especially strong on the amount and type of resources required. They have 10 good questions that assess whether a branded community is for you. I’ve boiled it down to 4; you might want to read the original (pp. 5,6). Here’s my summary:

• Do you have a business goal and clear marketing objectives that specify what you want to accomplish?
• How will your community add value to the customer experience?
• Do you have the resources and expertise to support a vibrant community?
• What metrics will you use to gauge success?

The ‘resources and expertise’ issue suggests substantial experience in social media—building a Facebook community for example. If that is successful, companies tend to want their own community over which they can have total control, not have to rely on the functionality and rules of the platform. I’ve written about firms that provide community-building services (1, 2) and many other aspects; just search ‘community’


Back to the original subject; community best practices. I found this chart especially interesting. The researchers at ComBlu added 10 best practices to their 2010 list. That certainly suggests how fast the space is changing. It also suggests that there’s a big shake-out to come as we find out which are the 'best of the best' practices!


They, of course, compared adoption of their original set of practices in 2010 vs. 2009. I’ve highlighted the ones that had doubled or more in adoption. If you look at the ordering for 2009 (comments the most widely adopted practice, for example), the adoption of specific best practices has changed hugely over the past year. The suggestion there is a maturing space. Among the greatest changes are fun engagement tools, rich media (which I’d also categorize as engaging) and faceted search (people search on LinkedIn, for example). The ones that warm my heart are integration and site stats! Definitely a maturing space.

How Fiskars Turned Its Fans and Customers into Evangelists, presented by Geno Church from GasPedal on Vimeo.

There’s a lot of detail in the report about best practices by industry that you may find useful. But for those of you who believe it’s only for the large, global brands, here’s a contrary example. I wrote about the Fiskars community in early 2009. It still has much the same structure and is still clearly a customer retention effort. Don’t expect much in the way of acquisition from a community effort although blog posts written for search and tagged will bring in some people who are browsing. Mostly, though, it’s retention, and as the Fiskars example shows, it can be powerful. I ran across the video awhile ago; admittedly it’s long, but the first 18-20 minutes is the presentation and the rest is Q & A. It’s worth listening to; the point being that they’ve been at it—successfully—for awhile in what is definitely a set of niche markets.

The most important point about best practices is that they are still evolving. So don’t run out and try to implement them all. Think about what makes most sense for your customers, your brand. Are emoticons going to remain on the list for years to come? My sense is that items like that are already being replaced with activities with more strategic value!

New Source for SMM Best Practices

Recently a social media marketing colleague asked me for a good source for best practices information in this space. When you know that question is coming from a small business that probably cannot afford much subscription research, it’s hard to answer. It’s information that many businesses are willing and able to pay for, so it’s usually paid content.

I had already used and cited the usual suspects. Marketing Sherpa does good executive summaries of its benchmark reports, Forrester releases some information on its blog, and Altimeter is following an open research policy. I’m sure there are others, but for the type of information I’m looking for, those are my usual go-to sources.

Consequently, I was pleased the other day to get a notice—blogger outreach, I assume!—of a new venture that is going to operate in that space. It’s not social media per se as best I can tell. Gleanster says it “benchmarks best practices in technology-enabled business initiatives.” That would seem to include any aspect of Internet marketing and quite possibly some initiatives that play out in the physical world.

Their early publications suggest considerable focus on the social media space. For readers of this blog the summaries of their Social Media Monitoring and Online Customer Communities research are well worth downloading. The communities paper contains a case study of Best Buy that makes my point about their focus. I’ve written about Best Buy and its retail Twelp Force campaign which uses Twitter to provide customer support for their retail customers. More detailed paid reports are the basis for these summaries.

I’ve been tagging posts with “best practices” when it’s relevant, so I hope I’m making a contribution to this important discussion. Maybe a good resolution would be to make more best practices posts; it’s a topic of concern to all of us!

Give Members Their Own ROI

Isaac Hazard, Director of Strategic Consulting at Mzinga, talked about “Member ROI” in my class a couple of weeks ago. It’s an important concept. If people, customers or otherwise, are going to spend time on your Facebook page, a corporate blog—wherever you build your community—you’ve got to give them something of value. These members of your community are giving you their time—and hopefully their trust. What are you giving them in return for those two valuable, and scarce, commodities?

In some ways the concept of Member ROI is a basic tenant of advertising. Good advertisers don’t write headlines and copy about the product. They work to understand the benefits that people want from the product. That often takes marketing research, hopefully done so you can design the benefits into your product. If you do that, the task of your advertising staff is easy; they talk about the benefits your product delivers to the target customer, and your advertising works. Product-focused advertising doesn’t work; benefits-focused advertising does.

Fast forward to the age of the Internet and social media. Online display advertising follows exactly the same principle; focus on your target customer and the benefits he/she wants, not on your product. That’s a relatively easy transition.

The transition to social media isn’t so easy. All of a sudden marketing has become conversational and marketers aren’t very good at that. The headline in Smart Brief called them “lousy conversationalists.” According to Jason Fall, “A marketer, in the public’s eyes, is a salesman. Our audience is predisposed to not trust us.” That’s true, but it’s only part of the story.

Sage Lewis nails it with his headline, “No One Cares About Your Products.” His argument, and he has a great pizza story, is that what people really care about is what other people--not marketers--say about your pizza. There are a lot of good comments; the article is well worth reading.

The power of customer reviews is undeniable in the social media era. But it’s still not the entire story. Marketers have to listen, participate and even seed conversations as they build online communities. And to the extent that marketers are used to talking about their products, even the benefits of those products, that is the hard transition.

The conversational marketer cannot focus on product. She has to focus on what customers want to know, what they need to understand, in the product or service space. As the marketer becomes more knowledgeable and skilled, there will be opportunities to explain how the product meets needs. That, however, is on a subsequent date—definitely not the first one!

Download the Mzinga white paper, “Social Marketing & Online Communities: Getting Started” and explore other resources on the site. It’s a good role model, making a major effort to provide value in various media channels and to encourage conversation. However only the individual marketer, can develop the conversational perspective; it takes time and practice!

You have already recognized that this is largely talking about acquisition marketing. When you are talking about CRM, the focus changes to helping customers successfully use your product, your service. But the focus is still on customer needs, not on product bells and whistles!

Whether it’s acquisition or retention, the social environment is about talking to people you want to be your friend, fan, member, whatever. Keep them coming back. Your time to sell will come—or maybe your happy pizza customers will do it for you! It’s all about providing real value in the exchange; that’s the way to make them loyal friends!

Carefully-Monitored Community for Students and Their Parents

I’ve spent most of my adult life on college campuses and an innovative approach to communicating with a college community always interests me. So I was interested in the Auburn Family site when a colleague sent me the link—thanks, Nancy!

First, let’s be clear about what the problem is. Colleges and universities don’t want parents and alumni to hear or see the raw, unfiltered accounts of what their students are doing; you know, the kinds of things that all-too-frequently show up on MySpace and Facebook. Students have the same problem; they don’t want their parents to know all of what they are doing at school. This problem led to the unceremonious closing of some of the early social networks that schools set up. This is well known in the higher education community, and schools have struggling with a way to give voice to their students—in a way that will not alienate their parents and the alumni of the school, the latter being donors, of course.

Auburn University has come up with a model that has promise. The concept comes from public relations professor Robert French and 30 of his design and management students designed and built it and currently do most of the posting. The site was launched on or about September 20 and at this moment it has 1,386 members. Take a look at the pictures; it appears to be a nice mix of students and parents. While you’re on the site you can hear the Auburn War Eagle fight song and, oh yes, there’s a link to the admissions office.


No secret is made of the fact that the site is under the total control of the students, their professor, and the University. Here is a quote from their site guidelines:

Because Auburn prides itself on its friendliness and thinks of itself as a family, and because this site will attract prospective students and visitors who want to know more about Auburn, photos, comments, and other postings must not be offensive or suggestive in any way. Since the space being utilized is part of the Auburn.edu domain, the university reserves the right to remove any postings and content at any time. (this phrase is underlined in the original)
All posts and comments are moderated on stories and videos posted here. Your posts will be moderated as soon as possible. The site is monitored throughout the day. (underline and bold theirs, not mine!)

They’ve got clear guidelines and people to do the community monitoring. According to the local newspaper, Prof. French:

wants to make sure the site is safe and clean for anyone to join, meaning anytime someone requests approval, there's a vetting process.

As you can see from the site guidelines, that applies to all content, not just to people who wish to sign up for the site. The goal is clearly to keep this a nice, clean site that no alumni donor can reasonably object to! Same goes for parents, especially parents of prospective students!!

Will this site be too controlled, too sanitized, for some Auburn students? Absolutely, it will. They have other places to post their commentary, pictures and videos. They may just be hoping that their parents don’t see those!

This is perhaps an extreme example of community monitoring and control, but I submit that it’s necessary for what Auburn wants to accomplish. What do you think?

A Community Manager Dishes

I’ve written about community monitoring several times because it’s key to successful online community. I was interested a couple of weeks ago in a Matt Rhodes Tweet about interviews Fresh Networks had conducted with Shirley Bradley, the community manager at Business Week. The first part of the interview has a lot to say about community management in general; the second is about community management in a publisher setting.

She describes her role as “efforts to include readers and incorporate user-generated content (comments, suggestions, longer form opinion pieces) in BW’s journalism, elevating our readers’ participation on the same level as our journalism.” Some of her specific duties are:
• Managing customer engagement; see the links in part 1 for the many activities involved. One important activity is to solicit reader involvement. In part 2 she talks more about the “crowdsourcing” techniques they use.
• Included in customer engagement is the monitoring of reader comments. Each editor also monitors his/her own blog. Monitoring is one way of gauging reader sentiment. It also includes removing comments that do not meet community guidelines.

Crowdsourcing is not my favorite term; it seems to smack of an unruly mob running amok. In spite of that, I wanted to see what they were doing, so I went to the CrowdSourcing page. You may have to go there yourself to read the explanation at the top of the page; the relevant phrase is “using large, distributed and minimally directed groups to accomplish tasks.” Ok. While you are there, note that there’s a Featured User—nice pr—and a block of Tweets on this topic (the main filter appears to be the term “crowdsourcing”). Well done!
















When you look further you find that Crowdsourcing is a page on their Business Exchange site (a community site powered by Ning, as far as I can tell). According to the site, “Business Exchange is a Web site that allows users to create business topics, collaboratively aggregate content from the entire Web and connect with other business focused users around these topics.” It has a mind-blowing number of topics (I checked on “Social Marketing,” surprise, surprise!). I registered using my LinkedIn profile. I’m not sure what that adds; it would have been just as easy to fill out the form. However, I may find that I signed up for something else on LinkedIn! Registered users can save content, create a network, and suggest topics as well as simply adding content.

The main take-away is that there’s a lot going on in Business Week’s social space. It’s probably not a luxury, it’s a necessity for a media vehicle that wants to survive in the changing media world. (On that subject, check out the website for Gourmet magazine before it goes away. The home page clearly focuses on content from their writers and editors. There are discussion forums, but there seems to be no serious effort to bring readers into the editorial process.)

Social media is undoubtedly not the silver bullet for survival for magazines, or any other media, for that matter. The more interesting question is whether a given vehicle can survive without enthusiastic reader participation.

While you’re mulling that question, you can learn a lot about community management (note it’s more than monitoring; see a great post by Dion Hinchcliffe) by reading the interviews with Shirley Bradley. Then stay tuned for my next post. I’ve discovered an interesting new community where content creation and monitoring takes on a whole new meaning—and potentially a whole new series of challenges!

BMW Roars Down the Road (Desk?) Again

I found my original link to the new BMW “Expressions of Joy” campaign in a Tweet by Kevin Swanepoel—thanks, Kevin! My reaction was that BMW has done it again in terms of pushing the envelope on advertising (build your own) and, more recently, customer engagement (the graffiti wall).

The campaign, launched in the UK in the spring, is for the new Z4 model. If you look around you’ll find a lot of the typical—photo galleries (some so complex they froze my screen so I’m not providing links) and TV ads posted on YouTube.


But it’s the augmented (not virtual) reality application that intrigued me. It’s a technological update of earlier ad campaigns. Basically, once you download the software (called a paintbrush app), it lets you drive the new Z4 on your desk. If you wish you can create your own “expression of joy” and upload it to the contest on Facebook—reminiscent of the graffiti promo. There are several posts on the wall of the Facebook page and at least one on the photo page.

There are lots of comments about how much fun this is—and that’s a lot of the point!—scattered around the web. The one I liked most added something about how this was a geeky toy to be used by companies with a lot of money.

That is no doubt true. It seems to be a proprietary application; is it based on the Microsoft Paintbrush Tool? I can’t tell.

What I do know is that BMW continues to reach out to a young, well-heeled target market and to understand how to engage them. The challenge for other marketers is to use innovative, cost-effective ways of reaching and engaging their target audiences. Some of that is technology and tools; much more is creative marketing thinking!

A Global View of Collaboration Tools

This chart of collaborative tools was sent to me by a colleague in the Netherlands—thanks, Ailsa! It’s informative itself and it leads to an interesting collaborative platform. Note that you can attach notes to the title bar, which is useful.


I copied 3 categories that were of most interest to me—platforms that allow you to create a private network, work group sites, and presentation sites. The map is huge; for the rest of it you’ll have to look at it for yourself. I’ll bet you agree that you had no idea there were all these platforms for collaboration of various types—Ailsa and I certainly didn’t!


Take a look at the MindMeister platform and some of the domains that are being mapped with it. Does it remind you of something you’ve done in a more ad hoc fashion on an easel or a whiteboard? The platforms listed here make something we’ve been doing all along easier, and being able to update it publicly, but in a controlled fashion, is real collaboration.

If you’re interested in collaboration, either as a small business person or as a project or team leader, you should take a look at another site. The App Gap blog, which I found courtesy of a Tweet by Ivana Taylor at Strategy Stew, talks a lot about collaboration and covers other topics of people who manage teams or small businesses. One correction though. Looking carefully, it’s not a blog from Intuit; it is from Beeline Labs and sponsored by Intuit QuickBase. Take a look at the blog. Is it a good promotional move for Intuit? I think so. I’d suggest that they connect it somewhere on their site; a new section for sponsored blogs would make sense. The Intuit site already has a lot of good resources for small businesses. Why keep this one secret?

Happy collaboration!

Is the Answer Disclosure or Context?

Another follow-up—this one to a post on compensating Mommy bloggers that I recently wrote for Reaching Women Daily. In that post, I argued for disclosure of any compensated blog post and suggested some guidelines for marketers who want to reach out to the vast blogosphere of mommy bloggers. (If you’re not aware of the vast network of connected moms or are looking for data, you might find this recent report by Razorfish and Café Mom useful.)

So I was interested in today’s 3-minute Ad Age video, an interview with one of the founders of BlogHer.com. According to the interview, they have a different approach to disclosure. It’s not on a post-by-post basis but requires the creation of separate blogs for compensated posts and those that are purely personal opinion. View the video here.

I searched the site (I’m not registered, but I didn’t find any parts I couldn’t enter) and I didn’t find an example of what Elisa Camahort Page describes in the video. I also couldn’t find a community rule that specified it exactly. What appears to be the newer BlogHerAds section may be the execution of the “context” policy, although what it says in the editorial policy is:

Contains editorial content that has been commissioned and paid for by a third party, and/or contains paid advertising links and/or spam. Every opinion expressed must be the true opinion of the author.

They certainly are concerned about blogger compensation; so is the FTC, which is still in the review process but intends to issue guidelines that will affect bloggers as well as other endorsers.
However, I wonder about the context issue. Thinking about how people read (or perhaps how much they often ignore), it seems to me that a disclosure policy like the one I reproduced in the post or a segregation of compensated posts still may not be enough.

If each post that had compensation (including “freebies”) associated with it had a simple disclaimer statement, wouldn’t that be better? That way it’s precisely where the content is located, not in a disclosure or an about this blog statement that might not be read.

That’s where it would be most visible and most meaningful. That would be good for readers; less good for marketers? Maybe, although in the long run, I still believe that transparency rules!

Starbucks Listens--and Acts!

Earlier in the week Michael Estrin had a good advice in iMediaConnection for those who want to have a good blog, either personal or corporate. The graphic from Starbucks caught my eye. It perfectly captures the concept of a community being involved in idea generation for a brand.

I always wonder whether companies follow up on good ideas so I checked it out. Here’s what I found.
















The My Starbucks Idea site seems to be the home page of the enterprise. It’s where you can sign up to be part of the idea generation process. It’s on a SalesForce.com platform, so clearly it’s intended for CRM. Do the numbers in the Categories section represent posts and comments—5,483 for Tea & Other Drinks, for example. Probably. I checked some of them and there are active postings, comments and discussions.

The Idea page links to the Ideas in Action blog where Starbucks employees give feedback. I captured a post that’s reporting on the number of ideas launched in a given week. Posts are frequent.

What’s really interesting is that there tend to be 2 or 3 comments on those employee blog posts—agree, disagree, whatever—there are a few comments on each post. Comments on the Idea site tend to be more active, and assuming that a point for a post represents a vote, the voting is very active. My point is that there seems to be more action on the site that’s mostly UGC than on the blog where employees, chosen for their expertise according to the site, blog about what they have actually done. Worth thinking about! Does it mean that brand enthusiasts enjoy talking with one another even more than they enjoy talking directly to the brand?

All in all, it’s a site—and a concept—worth exploring. Starbucks has created a community around something everyone loves to do—telling you how they think you should run their business. They’ve found a way to involve and engage, and they are following up in a disciplined fashion.

I’m not saying any of this is particularly easy, especially the follow-up. I am saying that it’s worth seeing what you can learn from Starbucks about engaging customers in your own brand.

The Importance of Community Monitoring

Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb sent me a copy of his recent Guide to Online Community Management. It’s a comprehensive, well-done guide that is recommended for anyone serious about the new position of community manager—either hiring one or being one.

I was on their distribution list because they picked up on a post of several months ago about monitoring community. In it I said that even with the help of a consultant it would take 3 to 6 months of serious effort to build a meaningful community. The report says that’s actually a short time, even with help, and in retrospect I couldn’t agree more. I also find interesting the comment that the more cost-effective long-term solution is an internal community manager.

It’s a 75-page guide, and I can’t cover all the issues they discuss, but I’d like to hit a few high points. Social media is not advertising, is it even marketing? Maybe. Is it more public relations and customer service? Quite possibly.

They do touch on the universal questions, “Should we have/do. . .?” In terms of corporate blogs, they see them as valuable for all except the businesses that refuse to devote sufficient time to them, especially in the midst of a crisis. I think that’s right on. Twitter they also see as invaluable. I’m a Twitter convert and absolutely see its uses. I follow a number of marketers who consistently provide good info in their Tweets and I greatly appreciate them. I also brutally unfollow people who are self-serving or fatuous (that’s a nice old-fashioned word that fits a lot of what I see). I don’t see Twitter as very useful for personal communication, but it’s a great professional asset and “value” is the point. The guide suggests being cautious about spending a lot of time on a corporate Facebook page because returns are hard to achieve. I’d also agree with that.

There’s a lot of focus on the importance of community managers in start-ups. They argue that a CM can be one of the early hires and one of the most cost effective. If you believe in the power of community , that makes sense. The alternative is traditional marketing with a sizeable budget. Community may make more sense for the start-up, but what about the established business? Deborah Ng provides a perspective from an established web business:

Do all businesses need a CM? I’m not sure. I think any company with a heavy Web presence would do well to have someone to spread the word and find out what makes its audience or client base happy. CM’s establish personal relationships and are more invested in the product or service than your usual publicist for hire. Plus, we know the social networks, we know the Web, and we know the bloggers. BlogTalkRadio wouldn’t have hired me if I was just Joe off the street. Being a pro blogger and being able to speak with other bloggers put me ahead of the other candidates. p. 21

What does it take to make a community successful? In a nutshell, a lot of hard work! But it has to be hard work that understands the nature of community. According to Justin Thorp from ClearSpring:

“Your users are the lifeblood of your community. You want to treat them like you’d treat guests in your house. Otherwise, like me, they’re going to make their way to the exits and not come back. One of the benefits of the Web 2.0 era we live in is that there are lots of places I could spend my time.” That’s the kind of plain-spoken, utility-based approach that all parties could probably agree with. That’s language that other people in a company could likely hear from a community manager and agree with (emphasis mine). p. 43

It’s an important part of the job of community manager to do the internal marketing that supports the community effort. That includes, but is not limited to, the importance of good metrics. Isn’t it interesting that efforts like lead generation are easily measured in social media and others like brand development are hard to track—just like in traditional marketing media! They also point to the 90/9/1 rule—it can be hard for a new community manager to remember that only 1% are likely to become “hardcore contributors.”

There’s a lot more, but I’d like to end with Heidi Miller’s tounge-in-cheek warings about using social media:

Treat people in your new social networks as prospects, not friends. Make sure that you constantly bombard them with one-way messages about how great your product is.

Be in a hurry to show “results.” Forget that “Connections over time equal trust” (--Tara Hunt); insist on showing immediate sales, hits, and click-throughs from your blog, podcast, Twitter, or Facebook page with no concern for building relationships with your friends and participants.

Keep it impersonal; sounds like a corporation. Avoid speaking in a human voice; always “regret any inconvenience we may have caused you,” instead of saying “sorry we messed up.” People love to interact with stale, sterile impersonal corporations, right?

Be the same. Never change. Keep on doing what you’re doing. Don’t bother to differentiate yourself from your competition; just stick with what you know. Never reach out.

Be afraid. Let your fear of loss of control of the conversation cause you to treat social media like traditional media. p. 45

As I said, there’s a lot more. The report is probably a bit pricey for a casual read, but for community managers—or those who need to have one—it’s must reading!

Celebrating Income Tax Day

Ok, I’m being sarcastic; it’s nothing to celebrate—at least it wasn’t for me this year! But it is one of the certainties of life, and it’s interesting to see how firms in the industry are handling it.

I’ve written about Intuit before, so I retained a couple of articles from Peppers and Rogers 1 to 1 Weekly newsletter (not archived on their website as far as I can tell) over the past few months. In November 2008 they wrote about Intuit’s dissatisfaction with the rate of abandonment on their website. Their existing metrics gave no information about why visitors abandoned before they purchased. However, Intuit had a more basic problem, chronicled in the newsletter on February 09, 2009. When Brad Smith took over as CEO in 2006 he realized he didn’t understand the product line and that employees didn’t either. I love what he did:

So Smith put himself in the shoes of the customer and visited a retail store that sells Quickbooks. He stood in front of the shelves for 17 minutes and still chose the wrong version from the dozens offered. How would he ever know how to improve the product if he couldn't grasp how it was supposed to work?
Smith decided to bring in a small business owner and Quickbooks customer to spend a day in his shoes experiencing his pains with the product. The customer, a bike shop owner, volunteered and handed over all his invoices and paperwork to Smith and his team, who then holed themselves up for a day in a boardroom trying to figure out Casey's typical interaction with their product. The outcome was confusing and cumbersome. "At the end of eight hours and close to tears, our leadership team was very clear about what we needed to do," Smith says. (1 to 1 Weekly, 02/09/2009)

Solutions included simplifying the product line. The most sweeping solutions involved a “Quickbooks Challenge” based on the experience above for all new employees and throwing out a lot of the policies in the contact center that made it difficult to resolve customer problems. The most significant action appears to have been a program called True North that focuses on improving customer experience.

Bruce Tempkin recently wrote about the True North program on his customer experience blog with a link to a post on Net Promoter (measuring satisfaction by a single measure of likelihood of recommending the product). Bruce’s posts on a presentation by Brad Smith and the one that includes Net Promoter are highly informative. So is one by a Canadian blogger who got Intuit to admit that they made some mistakes in implementation. They keep working at it, however, and they seem to be getting a lot of things right. According to Tempkin, Brad Smith said in his presentation that 81% of sales are directly attributable to word of mouth. That represents both careful attention to the voice of their customers and really good metrics to be able to say that with assurance!


So it’s tax day; what are they doing with Turbo Tax. They have active customer support and a vibrant community of customers helping other customers. At least I’d call it “vibrant;” over 30 thousand questions on Schedule C for Personal Business (whatever that is!) looks vibrant to me!

On a broader scale, Intuit has employees Tweeting about a variety of topics. Take a look at their page on Twitter for a thoughtful approach to corporate strategy there. They are promoting the basic Intuit community; Intuit Labs, where they are getting customer input into product development; the new Intuit initiative in India; and other strategic corporate initiatives. Each one seems to be drawing its own group of followers, some small but all focused on a particular issue. Good job!

What I don’t see is a Twitter stream for tax preparers. Think about it; taxes are seasonal (thank goodness!). Who wants to follow that all year, as opposed to the Quick Books products, which businesses use for daily operations? The community on the site seems to work for users of Turbo Tax at tax time; I’ll bet it’s pretty quiet the rest of the year. The Twitter streams are ongoing conversations that provide important feedback to Intuit on specific products and issues.

That’s strategic use of social media!

Happy tax day!!

Boone's Army is on the March!

I’ve written about the Pickens Plan before. Although having $58 million to spend on creating and energizing a community doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t guarantee being smart. I watch on a daily basis, and what I see is consistent effort, good community management, and considerable activity taking place within the community. All is indicative of a well-conceived, well-managed effort. Seems to me Boone Pickens is getting his money’s worth, although I’m sure he would say that the real proof will be getting elements of his plan put into action.

To continue the push, Wednesday through Friday of last week there was a Virtual March on Washington—the first thing just like it that I’ve seen. Once again, it was well organized and flawlessly executed. He explains much of what’s going on in this video. According to the website today 4,558,010 people took part. That sort of participation doesn’t take place by accident!

People who are members of the plan--”Boone’s Army” he calls them—were informed multiple times about the coming event. Members can set preferences for frequency of content, and if I investigated the timing carefully I’m sure I’d find that they were timed so every member with email contact got at least one message. Most of us got several.

Each day, Wednesday through Friday, members of the Army got a message—from Boone himself, of course—urging participation. Each day had a different theme to encourage repeat participation. When you clicked through to the site, you found it well organized to support the march.


What impressed me most was the message page. It had the usual prepared message, but this one was easy to edit, unlike others I’ve used. Most impressive of all was the list of recipients. Along with the usual suspects, it included “Your U.S. Senators” and “Your U.S. House Representative.” The contact info in step 2 is optional, but my guess is that they have congressional district in their database for virtually all members (they’ve worked hard on that also). They could personalize correctly whether the sender choose to include contact information or not (and apparently some of our elected representatives do require it in order to receive email messages). This application was powered by Capitol Advantage. Turns out that’s the publisher of print Congressional directories, and they now have an email personalization product. Cool! Especially since it works!! The acknowledgment message contained the names of my senators and representatives to prove that it did.

Once again, Boone Pickens and the generals of his Army (whoever those generals may be; I still can’t find out) seem to have done it all right. They built up interest, motivated people to participate, and gave the appropriate autonotification. I expect the website to be updated in a day or two with a follow-up on the march, doubtlessly accompanied by another video from Boone.

I keep recommending the Pickens Plan as a best practices site for non-profits. None of the ones I know have $58 million to spend, but the truth is that a lot of that went for television to jump start the Plan in the initial stages. The online portion can be copied by all but the very smallest non-profits; they’ll just have to be satisfied with building participants more slowly.

What can corporate marketers take away from this? Good management of social media programs for one thing. My sense is that Boone Pickens has no interest in seeing any of his money wasted. Beyond that, in a new media age, corporations should think about being a participant themselves. You can see several corporate partners on the site. Owens Corning was one of the early supporters—an obvious tie-in with their energy-saving product lines.

This is the age of the soft sell—not the hard sell or the intrusive ad. Non-profits do good. Corporations can do well by supporting carefully-chosen non-profits.

Three stakeholders win—the non-profits, the corporations, and society as a whole!

Customer Retention Communities

Social networks offer a great way to reach out in an attempt to acquire new customers. Meaningful social networks also offer an avenue to create bonds with customers that lead to retention. Peppers and Rogers recently published a good white paper on the subject (download here). I was initially struck by this chart which gives an excellent set of reasons about why social initiatives fail. Their reasons are worth serious consideration.When I reread the report, I realized they had several good examples of using social media to deepen customer relationships. They mentioned Fiskars and the scrapbooking community they had set up around a group of paid brand advocates. I have reservations about paying for social community participation, so I decided to check it out. I found a number of approaches worth thinking about.

First, their home page. This manufacturer of high quality hand tools clearly understands its market segments. They have a site for each segment, and once you’re there, you’re there. It’s actually a bit hard to get out of one and into another, but that’s a marketer’s perspective, not a customer’s. On the scrapbooking site I checked out the link for the Fiskateers and found that they are actively and pointedly recruiting customers to act as advocates. Ok, they are transparent about it, and, according to Peppers and Rogers, their visibility has gone way up, so it appears to be working. Transparency rules!

But I’m a gardener, and that’s the part of the site that interested me. What I found is a site built around Project Orange Thumb; I don’t understand why the thumb is orange but it’s an impressive grant program that supports community gardeners. What is even more impressive is the interconnected community they’ve built up around the project. There are events and a whole series of community blogs. There are “friends,” all of whom are master gardeners and likely paid for their willingness to connect their own sites to and in some cases to provide content for Fiskars. The community gardeners are passionate enthusiasts that Fiskars has gathered around their brand with a grant program that is not only clever marketing, it’s an example of a corporation doing good in the community. Explore for yourself, keeping in mind the word “interconnected.”

Oh, by the way, there’s a product page on each site. When you get there, it’s hardly an afterthought. There are detailed product descriptions, and I think I may need a couple of items for my summer garden. What I’m most impressed with, however, is the way the site puts the emphasis on the community activities. There are no blatant sales pitches.

I should probably point out that Fiskars is known as a superior brand—tools that last a lifetime. Could they do this with a brand of mediocre to poor quality? I very much doubt it.

That in no way detracts from the fact that Fiskars has a social media strategy—Peppers and Rogers’ first issue. It’s a strategy built on understanding of the interests and passions of distinct market segments. Their social media strategy supports those interests and activities; it doesn’t push product.

Fiskars has a traditional marketing strategy in traditional media. They sponsor gardening shows on TV, they advertise in gardening magazines and they have an effective distribution strategy that reaches specialty retailers. And they clearly get it in terms of the difference between traditional and social marketing.

That’s a growing proposition!

Managing Your Branded Community

As noted yesterday, I’ve been writing a lot about community lately; I think it’s a (the?) pillar of Web 2.0. I’ve done posts on aspects including best practices and monitoring. It was the monitoring post that connected me with Brian Person when he made a thoughtful comment.

Bryan works for LiveWorld, a supplier of community-related services. I’m breaking from usual practice in writing about it, because they don’t offer free services. Their target market is large corporations who are willing to pay for services that smaller businesses can provide for themselves. That gives them a special perspective.
LiveWorld offers a platform, but their value added seems to be in the services they offer to assist their customers. They manage branded communities and provide a monitoring service that is available to even to communities that do not run on their platform. That says something about what corporations are finding difficult or onorous. Why? I suspect its because of the necessity to set management and monitoring guidelines and train a group of people to implement them. In some cases it may also simply be that the corporations do not think they have employees with the necessary time or expertise.

They have an interesting new addition to their product line called LiveBar, which allows customers to add social functionality to their own websites by offering conversations and something they call “soapboxes” that have blog-like functionality. LiveWorld CEO Peter Friedman demoed the new offering at the Web 2.0 expo in late fall.

Earlier in the week I had an opportunity to talk to Brian Person, who’s written some interesting posts on the corporate blog lately. I asked him what made their services worthwhile when there are free counterparts available. He said that it’s partly their experience with social networks and communities. It takes 3 to 6 months of serious effort to build a sustainable community. It’s not a silver bullet and good consultants help managers understand that and have patience. Monitoring does seem to be a real issue. He says they usually monitor communities for their customers. They require the customer to invest at least 10 hours each week in community management. This is not an activity to just be outsourced and then wash your (corporate) hands of the operations. It’s your brand; continuous involvement is necessary even if you hire management services.

Both those are useful lessons for the small firm. “Community development,” if you will takes ongoing effort. Monitoring, with careful guidelines especially if done by more than one person, is essential.

So community may be the common theme of Web 2.0 and branded communities may be seen as desirable. However, they are neither resource-free nor quick nor necessarily easy to establish. The smaller business may find it wise to participate in established communities of interest rather than trying to start a branded community. What do you think?

Essentials of Web 2.0 Community

I’ve found myself writing a lot about community lately, and I have several other things I want to cover in days to come. This material has gotten me thinking and I’d like to suggest a couple of ideas.

The basic one is that “community” in the broadest sense, seems to be the uniting theme of the social web. That’s true in both B2C markets, where it’s easy to see, and also in B2B markets, where there is strong motivation for community building and participation.

If community is the uniting theme, what are the special elements of the social web in each marketspace? In the B2B space it seems obvious that collaboration—again broadly speaking--is the key benefit of focused social networks. For example, while I was writing this I got an update from LinkedIn guiding me to the activity of the Social Media group where people are asking questions, passing along information and looking for jobs and business. That’s a public network; the collaboration that goes on inside corporate firewalls on shared documents, wikis, and so forth is a major productivity enhancement, especially for global corporations.

In the B2C space the key element doesn’t seem—to me at least—to be as clear. I’ve called it User-Focused Communications, to include both relevant marketer-initiated communications as well as user-generated content. Do you have a better/another idea?

Whatever terms you use, I would argue that community is the common thread. What should we be thinking about in terms of “community strategy” if there is such a thing. A concept that has been circulating on the web for several months is the 4C’s of Community. They are:

• Content
• Context
• Connectivity
• Continuity.

Think about those and read this Ad Age article. Content, context and continuity are all things that require organizational commitment and resources. In the way it’s used here, connectivity is more than just the technology, and therefore it becomes an organizational issue also. More about that tomorrow.

There’s a lot of fun technology out there, and I enjoy that as much as anyone else. More important to marketers, though, will be the emergence of a strategic framework for thinking about the social web. Your comments on this broad-brush strategic concept are welcome!

Monitoring Community

For those of us who work in social media environments where the traffic is manageable (that probably can be translated that we wish it were higher!) monitoring is an ongoing but not huge job. Yes, it’s labor-intensive, but we know the issues and the values involved. Judgments can be made and unacceptable contributions can be removed or banned.

However, when you have a large vision and are willing to invest resources, you need more structure. All firms—large or small, experienced social media user or newbie—can learn from best practices of organizations that monitor their communities for the greater good.

I’ve written before about the Pickens Plan. It was launched in late summer and, in the run-up to the inauguration, is aiming for 2 million members. The plan wants them to be active, and that’s a lot of participation to monitor. My sense is that their district leaders are volunteers, but as I’ve noted before, Pickens and his people are not forthcoming about organizational details. But the leader in my district is an activist and has said some interesting things about the community lately.

What piqued my interest was an email in late November. It hit the right tone as a “friendly reminder.” It directed the reader to a blog post and that, in turn, to the Pickens Community Guidelines. If you follow links there, you see that the community is hosted on Ning and uses its terms of service but the guidelines seem to be specific to the Pickens Plan.

The guidelines are long but very much worth reading and thinking about. Let me highlight a few issues of interest:

• “Be Polite” is the first rule, and it has specifics.

• There are a lot of rules, all of which make sense to me, about proper use of the individual’s account on the Pickens Plan

• There are many rules that can be summarized as “no commercial activities”

• There are fraudulent or unethical activities that will result in account suspension.

and finally, to quote directly:

• We welcome constructive feedback, but will not tolerate excessive public posts criticizing Pickens Plan staff (including Site Administrators and Regional Leaders).

• Public posts debating these rules and/or moderators' enforcement of such will be removed without comment. We do encourage feedback and invite you to contact us if you have any questions or concerns.

So there’s a lot of effort here. I get the sense that they may be using some filtering software also, but again they aren’t forthcoming (in this case quite understandable) about tools and techniques.

Ok, so this is a huge public effort. What about large corporations, especially on the B2B side? I looked at IBM and easily found a values statement and a set of guidelines for a community of current and former IBMers. There may be other communities and sets of guidelines. This particular one is hosted on Xing, a global networking service, with its own guidelines. IBM added guidelines for its own employees on top of those.

Adobe makes a big effort to get customers to offer content that will be helpful to other customers. The guidelines for the Adobe Forums are specific to that purpose and, again, make a lot of sense.

What are the key take-aways on monitoring communities? I’d suggest:

1. Communities must be monitored in terms of acceptability and relevance.
2. They need rules of the road. The rules need to be tailored to the nature of the community.
3. The rules must be enforced. That requires individual judgment and action, and that is fine. If moderators don’t perform effectively—whether it’s an employee, a PR agency, or a volunteer—the organization should replace them, quickly and decisively.

This is a conversation. If it’s not civil, there will be many of us who do not wish to take part. Those who want to form a community should carefully think through its objectives and the guidelines and activities that will be necessary in moving toward those objectives.

My PSAs

You may have had some of these during election season also; this is by far the best I’ve seen. So take a minute to view the video and to think about the power of personalization.


Then I’d encourage you to see how Boone Pickens is tying his energy program to election day.

Then go vote!

Better than Viral?

A few days ago an article in iMediaConnection entitled “Tips for Media Seeding” caught my attention. It questioned our ability to make most marketing campaigns viral—not news to many of us. Yes, there are some exceptions; Burger King’s subservient chicken has been around since 2004 and you can still interact with it. It’s important to note that this is entertainment, with minimal promotion for Burger King.

This quote from the article captures the essence of the “big seed” approach:

"As an alternative to traditional viral marketing, agencies can employ a big-seed distribution strategy. In doing so, a planner assumes a low pass-along rate for any piece of content. To counteract the effects of the low pass-along rate, the planner makes efforts through paid placements, syndication or sponsorships to grow the number of initial seed users exposed to the piece of content. Thus, instead of relying on a small number of seed users, the planner relies on a large number of guaranteed exposures."influencers, s

To prove their point the authors give a case history in which Sega of America produced 4 videos. The first one was “seeded;” read that paid advertising and sponsorships were used to promote the video. The other three had no promotion. The first was viewed 797,000 times, more views than the other three combined.

That means the advertising reached “influentials” who passed it on, right? I started looking, and the consensus seems to be that it’s not that easy on the Internet. Consider the statement in a recent post that everyone can be an influential at the appropriate time. There’s a lot of research going on; much of it coming out of the Collective Dynamics Group at Columbia University. Their working paper version of the HBR article referred to in iMediaConnection makes an important statement:

“based on our results we would go as far as to suggest that in focusing on the properties of a few “special” individuals, the influentials hypothesis is in some important respects a misleading model for social change. Under most conditions, we would argue, cascades do not succeed because of a few highly influential individuals influencing everyone else, but rather on account of a critical mass of easily influenced individuals influencing other easy-to-influence people” ( p. 34)

In other words, the old opinion leadership/influencials model that we all learned in either a sociology or marketing course is questionable in the content ecosystem of the web. Cascasdes (of information) can start in many places.

Here’s another lengthy, statistical treatment from the same researchers. There’s a lot of discussion of these ideas in the blogosphere also, some referenced below. I’ll plan to do another post soon and talk about metrics, because the measurement issues are key.

An Edelman white paper gives some of the easiest-to-digest information. This is the model they propose; it covers both influencers and the influenced. It doesn’t give approaches to identifying either, but it does work on the hypothesis that people use information to make sense of and maintain control over their worlds. That’s all of us, and the Internet has given us a bigger scope for our information search. They also seem to accept the view that context is critical. In this view influencers attract attention, engage others, and influence them to take action. That’s what we all want influencers to do for us. The influenced identify interest in a subject, fulfill their need for information, review that information, and then take action. Both make sense, especially if you accept the argument that it’s not a small group of so-called influentials, but crowds of people who like to influence and be influenced, depending on the context/situation.

That’s interesting, but it doesn’t leave us with any directions for marketing action. Valeria Maltoni’s Conversation Agent blog had a lengthy post with many links early this year. Her conclusions come from reviewing several sources and make sense to me. She recommends:

1. Focus less on who people influence and more on how people are influenced.
2. Think more about networks, and network structure, rather than treating everyone as behaving independently (group dynamics).
3. Move away from the idea that buzz can be engineered to achieve some pre-established outcome, and get better at measuring and reacting to buzz that arises naturally (observation from context).

There’s also an interesting, if a bit disjoined, live-blogging post from a September conference on the Mashraqi blog. He has some good recommendations also.

I keep coming back to the idea that this is a dialog going on in social networks or communities (are those the same thing? I think so). As marketers, we can’t just single out a few opinion leaders and expect them to do the job for us. The new Crest Weekly Whitening Paste seems to have taken that approach. I keep watching to see when it comes out of its “quiet phase” and begins to engage in active promotion. The only recent action in the blogosphere I can find via a Technorati search (lots of noise in those searches) is coupons for the other Crest Whitening products. Stay tuned.

It looks to me as if making a campaign viral, even assuming good content, is going to require several planned steps. Does that make sense?

Best Practices for Community Building

I got another email from T. Boone Pickens on Saturday:

We did it!! Over 1 million members in the New Energy Army!

Not surprising. I featured the Pickens Plan efforts to build a community around alternative energy issues on Friday. It’s been an aggressive and successful program. It provides a good opportunity to follow up by talking about best practices. I’ve received two reports recently that are helpful in that regard. Both deal with internal-facing communities as well as external-facing communities. I’m going to concentrate on the external customer communities.

The report from Mzinga, a provider of social media and enterprise learning, points out--as I so often have—that the world is changing and that marketers have to get with the program. (“Introduction to Online Communities,” download the slideshow or view the archived webscast on this page.) We all know, however, that’s easier said than done. That’s the “challenges” box.

The report from Awareness Networks, a provider of enterprise software for building both internal- and external-facing communities, points out that businesses are using communities to build their brands, communicate with customers, and increase engagement. Communication was first in 2007 with brand building second—interesting. That says we are using communities more directly to meet marketing objectives. What specific techniques are we using? The top 4—video, social networking, blogs, and communities—could all be subsumed under community-building/engagement techniques. Does that mean that a lot of the Web 2.0 activities are beginning to coalesce around building community? I think so.

Mzinga gives recommendations for successfully building community:

• Get leadership buy-in. Web 2.0 activities represent transformational changes in the way marketers deal with customers (and with their own employees, remember). Transformational change has to be managed and it has to have the active support of top management.
• Think big, but start small. Listening is the best way to start. Then gradually move into communicating in relatively “safe” ways. Blogs are, indeed, a good way to start.
• Build a well-defined pilot. This is no time to be saying that “we need a community because everybody else has one.” The first step is good marketing/business objectives. Then use Web 2.0 tools to achieve those objectives—over the intermediate to long term. There’s no quick fix here.
• Building community is not an exercise in technology. We all need technology to play in the Web 2.0 world. But technology is not the issue. What our target audiences want and need—and how they are willing to participate—is key.
• Invite a few, then grow. Unless you’re willing to match Boone Picken’s $58 million expenditure, be willing to let this evolve. It’s not only cheaper; it’s safer. You’ll learn along the way.
• Keep it fresh and relevant. Marketer-supplied content may form the initial basis for the Web 2.0 activities. But they’re not going to be successful unless you engage your audience and get them to participate and contribute. You need user-generated content to do this.
• Be prepared to share control. See the previous point. You cannot at the same time solicit user content and be in complete control of the conversation. Be prepared to take a few hits. Even more important, if the criticisms are warranted, deal with them—immediately and honestly.

No one says this is easy. But it is a new world—a new marketer playing field—are you prepared to play?

The Fastest-Growing Community?

T. Boone Pickens announced his energy plan and social networking site in early July. According to Ad Age (July 21) he planned to spend $58 on advertising and PR for the initiative. That’s not chump change, but it’s also not huge by corporate budget standards. He’s been all over TV since then, but it’s the building of his “ New Energy Army,” a community to support his plan, that is fascinating. I joined in September and put the badge over on the sidebar.

I got two or three emails from him last week urging me to attend an e-rally after Tuesday’s presidential debate. I signed up for it, but wasn’t interested in firing up my computer at that time of night. But I was really curious, so I watched the 43-minute video today. If you don’t want to take the time, I’ll give you a few high points.

It was a discussion between Pickens and Carl Pope, the Executive Director of the Sierra Club. That’s might be viewed as strange political bedfellows, but in the realm of alternative energy it’s not. They talked about issues related to alternative energy production and transmission but mostly they talked about having the political will to solve the US dependence on foreign oil. The way they position it is interesting—creating clean alternative energy sources will create enough US jobs to get the economy moving again. That’s a pithy summary, but it captures the essence of their common perspective. They took a few viewer questions, but Pickens reminded people several times to send in their comments; all would be in the hands of the candidates “within 48 hours.” He also asked them to call their friends and ask them to join the army.

What reminded me to watch the post-debate video was an email I received yesterday:

Army

We're really close. Let's get to 1,000,000 today. Sign up just one more person at http://action.pickensplan.com/tellafriend.

-Boone

Yes, he has an HTML weekly newsletter, but this was a simple, direct, text appeal. Interesting. It seems to be typical. Yes, he’s recruiting directly through his TV ads and other media appearances. A lot of the “Army” recruitment is being done through his site, which has all the new media bells and whistles. Today’s home page has a brief post-debate video and the continuing appeal to reach 1 million strong today. The tell-a-friend appeal in conveyed in many ways.


In my opinion, one doesn’t have to agree with every element of the plan to know that something needs to be done. If as a citizen you are moved to do so, join. If as a marketer you are moved to examine the site for the various community-building and communications devices they are using, you can only be impressed. Pickens is focused, direct, and as far as I can tell, transparent about what he’s doing (except for who’s his agency; I still can’t find out; that keeps the focus on the content where he wants it, I think).

Whatever your perspective, this initiative is worth watching for superb use of social networking tools.