This month’s Online Community Expert Interview is with Dawn Lacallade. Dawn is a social media practitioner whose projects include Dell Community Forums, Ideastorm and currently the SolarWinds communities.
In her own words, Dawn “has a passion for releasing the full value of a completely integrated community and clearly demonstrating the results.” She is currently chasing this passion with the deeply integrated communities at SolarWinds, where community is one of the core tenants of business. As the Community Manager at SolarWinds, a Network Management Software company located in Austin, Texas, Dawn is responsible for the Community strategy, direct integration of Community in the SolarWinds products, growth of Community product extensions, Community engagement and implementation of all Community projects. Before joining SolarWinds, Dawn was the Manager of Ideastorm and the Dell Community Forums. She led the evolution from the focus on support forums to a broader integrated community including the Forums, Blogs, and Ideastorm.
Q: I’ve heard you use the term “deeply integrated community”. Can you define what you mean by that term?
When I say this, I mean simply the level of engagement with every aspect of the company. Often I will see companies that are deeply integrated with their community in a single area, like say a support community. That same company will have a marketing team that has no awareness or interest in involving the community in their processes. What about the website team? How about product development? A deeply integrated community is part of the core fabric of a company and can be seen in all groups. I see this as the next great evolution of the companies that thrive on customer satisfaction; get your customers involved in everything!
Q: During your time at Dell you were a key player on the IdeaStorm site. Looking back on that experience, can you talk about the 3 most important things that you personally learned as a community practitioner? In your opinion, do you think IdeaStorm is a sustainable model?
While I was not involved in the creation of Ideastorm, I did take responsibility for it after the first year. My focus, while working on Ideastorm, was to work with Salesforce to improve the technology to be more scalable. When the site was initially launched the functionality on the back side was very minimal. You had few tools to manage the hundreds or thousands of ideas that came in. You could not assign them to someone, check status, nag people, etc. This was all done manually via email (if you can imagine). The inherent tools within the Salesforce architecture and some gifted developers made an outstanding suite of tools in short order. I had huge learnings from this time.
Here are my top three that come specifically from Ideastorm:
1. A quality product (tool) is MUCH more than what you can do on the front end (from the user’s perspective). The back end is as important or perhaps even more important.
2. The largest challenge in a tool like this is not getting the feedback(people are dying to tell you), but in disseminating it within the company and prompting action.
3. Depending on your product lifecycle, the action can come more slowly.
Is Ideastorm a sustainable model? Good question. I think that it is much like the launch of any community tool; to be successful, the tool has to align with the goals and have the proper amount of resources and commitment from the company. In the community ideation space specifically; an Ideastorm is the broadest of strokes you can take. You are literally saying to anyone that has an idea about anything that you want to hear it, all at once, and they all expect responses. This could be way too much for many companies. Where I see the future of community ideation is in the hybrid models. These might allow the community to offer ideas and comments on a topic that the company lays out. Or perhaps the community picks the topics and then the company selects the questions. Either way delivers more targeted feedback on the areas that you have the most need at the moment so you can better align with business pain points and product roadmap timing.
Q: The boundaries between many “corporate” web sites and their social corollaries are softening (and in some cases being erased). Do you see this trend at solarwinds? How is it playing out in your day to day online strategy? What do you see longer term?
I agree the lines are blurring, particularly in the support communities. Indeed at SolarWinds we have some content that is currently shown on both the SolarWinds.com site as well as on thwack (our user community). As we continue to look at the community as partners in all that we do, this linkage will continue to grow. As for the sites moving together, absolutely that is happening. Anyone looking at thwack over the last 18 months has seen a much closer integration with SolarWinds.com.
As for the general future of this trend, I believe the best option for the end user is a blending of the traditional website and the community offerings. Back to the support site example, a blend of documentation and support avenues from a traditional website with the community generated/vetted/edited content delivers the best value to a user. I believe users need both the fully vetted content created by the company as well as the more agile content created by the community. I think the combination will ensure that the long tail of content that is often overwhelming for a company is addressed via the community. I don’t know that anyone has struck a perfect balance out there yet. (if someone has one, please let me know!) I think many companies are working on this blend and it will be the future of the on-line support website.
Q: Many community teams are struggling with which metrics to measure to assess the health of their community, as well as to quantify and qualify value back to the organization. Can you share your guidance on metrics, and any thoughts you might have on the importance (or lack of) for proving “ROI”?
Wow, I could write a novel on this subject. In my opinion, there is nothing more important than having clear goals and measures to evaluate the success of those goals. I propose there are three main groups of measures you should be reviewing weekly (for the community manager) and monthly for the “Stakeholders”. (Stakeholders include your management team as well as management from any other groups that are involved in the funding, benefits, or strategy of the community) Here are my groups and a description of what they include.
1. Business Measures: These show how you directly move business measures via your work. These HAVE TO BE specific to your company. There is no one size fits all for discovering these measures. Let me explain. For example: A support forum allows questions and answers. The metric might be “answered posts” and “views of answered posts”, but neither of these is the metric the business follows. To be a good business measure, it needs to be in the business terms (is it on one of the business scorecards?). In this example you would gain agreement that one answered question = one call avoided into the support call center. You might then decide that 1% of all views of the answered content is also considered one call avoided. This would give you a number of calls avoided per week/month/quarter/year. That is the level these metrics need to go to be relevant to the business stakeholders.
2. Community Health Measures: This group generally shows the activity on the site. These include the common measures of new registrations, posts, page views, visits, unique visitors, search data and sentiment. In these measures you are looking for trends and the actions that drive activity. For example, if you had a very high month, was it because you had a brilliant new product released or because your brilliant new product had a huge flaw that made people angry? You must understand the causes of change for these measures to have true value.
3. User Behavior Reports: In order to truly understand and connect with the community, you need to know what the behaviors are and when they change. For example, you know that John has been a power user for the past year posting 5 answers a week. For the past 3 weeks, you have not seen John. This should be a huge red flag for you to reach out and check on John. A truly gifted community manager will notice these things. It enables you to thank those that go above and beyond and bring back those that might be disillusioned.
Q: Lastly, any advice for those interested in becoming a community manager?
This is a fantastic and dynamic field! I think the rules are still being made and it changes almost daily! For this and many other reasons, I recommend this field to others often. I have found that those that come into this field from a passion for customers and for improving business do much better than those that come with a campaign mentality. Here are a couple of lessons learned to consider:
1. Learn from many sources: Books, websites, benchmarking and certainly talking with those that have done this before.
2. Don’t believe anyone that says there is a one size fits all answer for community. No such thing.
3. Start by joining communities and observing. What works? What doesn’t? Your observations as a user are great data for your gig as a Community Manager.
4. Drive your organization to CLEAR goals before beginning anything.
5. Build a strong relationship with your community and then when you make mistakes, they will forgive you.
6. Get to know your users as people (goes with above).
7. Never overpromise to either your Stakeholders or your Community. It breaks trust.
8. Keep one eye on the new tools, but don’t get caught up with a shiny object when a tried and true forum for example would do better for your goal.
9. Don’t be afraid to learn as you go.
10. And the most important, Don’t ever over sell your abilities. I have met several people that make their resume sound like they know/have done more than they have.
