The Online Community Business Forum was held May 3-4 in Sonoma, CA
Some highlights from the event were:
Opening Session: New Opportunities with Online Community
Bob Rebholz from Microsoft started us of with his session on New Opportunities with Online Community. The session was a good balance of Bob’s personal philosophies regarding online community, as well as hints on Microsoft’s next generation community strategy.
Bob advanced the notion that we can take advantage of weak-tie relationships to stay “in the know” on information that is relevant to our productivity and problem-solving needs.
- No-ties: no duration, one-way communication, e.g., support site – come, get question, and leave
- Strong-ties: long duration, two-way communications, formal in and out, e.g., MySpace, community moderators
- Weak-ties: in the middle, two-way with some, but not all, with other people’s interconnections factored in, e.g., social networks, sets of RSS feeds
Specifically, Bob wants to use weak tie-based communities to proactivley “solve” user support issues. “Why isn’t it the case that anyone who has an issue doesn’t find out from others like them”. The power of weak tie communities is that you can leverage social filtering from people like you to stay informed and increase your productivity.
Session 2: Dimensions of Value of Online Communities
Next up, Laura Bennet from IBM and Matthew Lees from the Patricia Seybold Group led the group through a session on the Dimensions of Value of Online Communities.
Session 3: Online Community ROI
Joe Cothrel from Lithium and I followed with a presentation on Online Community ROI.
Specifically, we proposed the notion that there was enough publicly available data and likely enough data internally that most companies could put together a model that describes the ROI of its’ Online Community Investments.
Publicly available stats (compiled by Joe)
- Community users remain customers 50% longer than non-community users. (AT&T, 2002)
- 43% of support forums visits are in lieu of opening up a support case. (Cisco, 2004).
- Community users spend 54% more than non-community users (EBay, 2006)
- In customer support, live interaction costs 87% more per transaction on average than forums and other web self-service options. (ASP, 2002)
- Cost per interaction in customers support averages $12 via the contact center versus $0.25 via self-service options. (Forrester, 2006)
- Community users visit nine times more often than non-community users (McKInsey, 2000).
- Community users have four times as many page views as non-community users (McKInsey, 2000).
- 56% percent of online community members log in once a day or more (Annenberg, 2007)
- Customers report good experiences in forums more than twice as often as they do via calls or mail. (Jupiter, 2006)
From the April 2007 ROI Survey:
- Only 22% of respondents had clear ROI Model
- 42% had staff of 1-5 people
- 49% Report Monthly to Mgmt
- Establishing ROI Model was a priority for most respondents in the near term
Full powerpoint deck here.
Session 4: Engaging Your Community
We started Friday off with a bang with Sean O’Driscoll from Microsoft and Mark Williams from Apple discussing Community Engagement. Sean runs the Microsoft MVP program, and Mark runs the Apple forums, so the session was an interesting look and the way both companies encourage key contributors.
Breakout Highlights:
Mary Furlong led a breakout session on Marketing and Online Communities. This was a really fast-paced and collaborative session but some of the highlights were:
- If you have a large offline community, it may seem obvious to try and convert to online. In Mary’s experience, this hasn’t been successful unless you reach out to those offline members online in other sites they visit, not necessarily your site.
- Convergence is happening. Examples include serialized TV dramas like Lost that cross online / TV boundaries.
Christina Wodtke of Cucina Media and William Goegebeur of Naviscent led a breakout session on Designing for Social Experiences. The basic premise of the session, is that much like usability, sociability is an aesthetic that needs to be considered when designing social software. Instead of one to system interaction, how do you support one to many and many to many interactions?
Closing session: The Future of Online Community Business Models
Peter Friedman of LiveWorld and Jerry Michalski of Sociate led the group in a discussion on the future of online community business models.
Highlights from the session:
Peter thinks we have been living in a market anomaly since the end of WW2. He thinks that commerce will retrun to a more “medieval market-like experience”.
Jerry added that most community web sites were “features parading as applications”. He is frustrated by the lack of standards, and thinks it is ridiculous that data and experiences are essentially “trapped” on destination sites.
Conference Tag: Ocbf2007
Other Blogger’s Posts about the OCBF:
Sara Ford: Microsoft
Trip Report: Online Community Business Forum
Sean O’Driscoll: Microsoft
“Hi Mac, I’m PC”
Live from the Online Community Business Forum…
