Day one of the Online Community Business Forum was fantastic! Our day was packed with four sessions covering thriving in a downturn economy, managing the community ecosystem, measuring & improving community performance, and embracing community and social media & getting execs engaged. We also had three break-out sessions on context and reputation, sourcing innovative product & service ideas from communities, online community culture.

Here are some of the highlights from the first three sessions:
10:00 – 11:00: Session 1 / Community Strategy: Thriving in a Challenging Economy  
Session Lead:  Thor Muller, CEO – Satisfaction
Session Lead:  Nova Spivack, CEO & Founder, Radar Networks / Twine.com
Thor Muller, CEO –Satisfaction

Current economic environment is like the “Buffalo Culture” of the Great Plains Indians
• Had to do more with less; culture centered around the Buffalo
• They used the whole animal as opposed to Europeans who only ate the tasty parts
• “Throwing away the rest” is no longer viable

Six themes of today’s challenging economy that mirror the Buffalo Culture of the Native Americans
• There is hidden value in those areas we used to dismiss
• Values need to be integral to the life of the tribe
• Be migratory
• Don’t resist the gathering of different tribes
• Adaptations are important for survival
• Have reverence

Nova Spivack, CEO & Founder, Radar Networks / Twine.com

Leverage their community three ways.
• Originally created beta community for user feedback and suggestion.
• Created Twine Lounge for top beta customers to participate in private community. Challenge is how to re-engage big supporters turned distracters.
• Current focus is community outreach to attract new members to create connections to new ‘rising stars’

Features
• Do a lot of measurement to see what users want
• Random sample surveys
• Work with anthropologist

User feedback
• Interest feed
• Search
• Twine Management
• Bookmarklet
• Recommendations

Key Challenges
• Rapid growth – sysadmins don’t usually expect the intense 40-80% month growth
• Scaling
• Member culture change – how does a small team scale to support rapidly growing community. Recruit members of the community to help support community

The Economy
• Conserve Cash
• Keep the team together – Twine has a strong team. Salary cuts instead of layoffs, shortened work week (work from home). They hypothesize that this will actually make productivity go up.
• Viral marketing instead of paid campaigns

Opportunities for community sites
• Highlight communities about the economic crisis and what people can do about it.
• People want support from others
• People have more free time (if unemployed)
• People need online meetings places for cheaper collaboration

11:30 – 12:30: Session 2 / Managing Your Online Community Ecosystem

Session Lead: Jen Burton, Community Manager – Digg
Managing online community and ecosystem are “impossible to manage”

What is an online community ecosystem?
• Community = A group that share a common characteristic and perceive itself as distinct
• Ecology = an assemblage of interacting populations occupying a given area
• Online community = No geographic or even domain boundaries. User-type diversity is important. Self-defining
• Communication – key communication happens member-to-member. Just having business-to-member communication is not enough
• Digg’s community ecology
• What does this ecosystem do?
• As a community manager “Have to have eyes in the back of head”
• Monitoring the conversation
• How to go to the conversation
• Uprisings, swells and revolts (don’t get caught off guard)
• Engaging the ecosystem (not a simple task).
• Happy Fun Times (remember the good times we had)

Session Lead: Erica Kuhl, Sr. online community manager – Salesforce.com

• Salesforce.com community ecosystem (everything is cloud)
• PR team is now taking management and creating strategy around Facebook and Twitter.
• Power of each and what it means to SFDC
• Power of Twitter
• Power of Facebook
• Power of Feedback
• Power of Discussions
• Power of Ideas
• Power of blogs
• Power of User Groups

1:30 – 2:30: Session 3 / Measuring & Improving Community Performance
Session Lead: Sylvia Marino, Executive Director – Community Operations, Edmunds.com Inc.
Session Lead: Mike Rowland, President – Impact Interactions

Mike Rowland

Three Measurement Categories
Methodology when talk about metrics break down into 3 metrics
• Traffic – how many
• Behavior – what did they do?
• Value – what value did we gain by offering the community?

One of biggest misconceptions today that they see is = Traffic & behavior DO NOT EQUAL VALUE (but they do help drive it)
• What is important is what folks are doing and how you engage them.
• When look at metrics for performance look at trending. Must know ‘why’ before know ‘what’
• Behavior is function of many things. Know if traffic declining that have a problem.

Common mistakes that impact community results:
• Poor outreach
• Too much input
• Confusing users
• Enthusiast and volunteers

Sylvia Marino

• When look at traffic also take in to account brand reach
• When measuring behavior look at qualitative and quantitative.
• Tip = When you notice a dip in the flow of your community, people often look into problems in their own application. Oftentimes it could be an external application not reporting back to your site. Need to go out and be investigator and look at problems at systems that are not yours.
• Value – create a trend report a few times a month of what the community thinks. Sometimes use as press or push to twitter.

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