The Online Community Business Forum is coming together nicely. We are hosting the invitation-based event May 3 - 4 in Sonoma.

We're fortunate to have some really experienced groups coming: Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, IBM, eBay, Sun, Autodesk, Cisco, TV Guide, and Consumer Reports.

The draft agenda is set, and Jim and I are working on refining it based on the attendees. The cool thing about doing a relatively small and invitation-based conference like this is that we can really tailor the content to the attendees.

The working agenda, as it stands:

Thursday May 3rd
1:00 - 1:30: Registration at Saddles
1:30 - 2:30: Session 1 / Introductions and Welcome
2:30 - 3:15: Session 2 / The State of Online Community
3:30 - 4:00: Break
4:00 - 5:00: Session 3 / Business Models
5:00 - 5:30: Wine Tasting
7:00 - 8:30: Wine, Hors Doeuvres - El Dorado Kitchen

Friday May 4th
8:30 - 9:30: Registration / Breakfast
8:30 - 9:30: Community and Good Ideas Demos (open podium)
9:30 - 10:00: Introductions
10:00 - 11:00: Session 4 / Subscriber Income
11:00 - 11:30: Break
11:30 - 12:30: Advertising & Marketing Panel
12:30 - 1:30: Lunch
1:30 - 2:30: Break Out Sessions - Community ROI, Support Communities, Developer Communities
2:30 - 3:00: Break
3:00 - 4:00: Session 6: On the Horizon: Future Online Community Business Models
4:00 - 5:00: Wine and Snack
Evening: No host dinners at Café LaHaye, Saddles, elsewhere (optional)

The other really cool think about hosting an event in Sonoma is that we have ready access to the world's best wines.

Drop me a line if you would like to learn more about the event, please: bjohnston@forumone.com.

I've been guilty of this many times, but there are always friendly reminders.

One of the most important things to keep in mind about your community ecosystem: Don't forget about the "real" world.

This sign was posted on one of the major intersections in my town of Fairfax today.

As a follow up to all the recent questions I've been getting about basic online community strategy, I've decided to write a series on online community basics. First up is one of my favorite topics, research!

Start With Research: The 3 questions to ask.

Q1. What does your current community ecosystem look like?
It's important to make an inventory of your existing community touch points. Think you don't have any? Think again.

A potential starter list:
- user groups
- independent bloggers (check blogpulse.com)
- discussion groups / google groups / yahoo groups
- enthusiast sites
- industry / topic publication sites
- meetup.com / upcoming.org

You should be seeing some signs of life. Found something? Good.

Q2: What do your customers, prospects or partners need from you?
As a business, you are in a unique position to provide value to your community of prospects, customers, and partners. This could be simply providing a "clean, well lit place", exclusive content, or access to your employees. How do you gain insight into what your community needs? Ask. Face to face, conference calls, email questionnaires, or web-based surveys (survey monkey) are all effective and relatively cheap. You can also hire research firms that specialize in this type of needs-based analysis.

Q3: How would your organization benefit from hosting a community site?
This question is in it's rightful place. Ask not what your online community can do for you... or at least not as your first question. Seriously though, it's important to align your community strategy and direction with your general business strategy. Who do you start with? The stakeholders who will be writing checks to pay for the ongoing community infrastructure, moderation, and maintenance. Including stakeholders in this phase will also help to ensure buyoff, and help flag any early concerns about unrealistic or inappropriate expectations of the community. Others you may want to involve? Your web team, marketing, product management, and customer support.

Update: Lee makes an excellent point in his post here that the community champions, which maybe different from the community stakeholders, need to be identified as well. That would be Question 3.a

The Shared Insights folks have posted links to all the blog covergage from the Community 2.0 conference here:
http://www.community2-0con.com/?p=238

I've had a few days to let all the threads running through my brain since the end of the conference settle. Here are the things that rise to the surface.

Mobile Communities: Thanks to Anders from Nokia, I am now convinced that the mobile web in general, and mobile communities in particular will play a large role in shaping "what's next". For mobile communities to take off in any meaningful way in the US, the carriers will have to agree and services and standards. Companies like Loopt are already making inroads with the major carriers. How significant a shift will this be? It seems reasonable to think that any social application (think next gen myspace or linked in) that doesn't require the form factor of a large lcd display to interact with it will make it's way on to a mobile.

3D / Avatar-based Communities: In general, folks at teh conference seemed to think that these destinations are interesting, but not really meaningful. Kaneva just entered the space that Second Life, and to a certain extent There, have been dominating. I think there is lot's of opportunity for innovation with this type of experience, especially given the wild success of World of Warcraft and other MMOGs that are essentially the older brothers of these more hangout-oriented sims. Unfortunately in their current state, the experiential investment required to participate Second Life is not worth the overhead. I look forward to changing my position on this.

Marketing in Online Communities is bad / evil / wrong: There was lot's of discussion about the intersection of online community and marketing. The Edelman / Wal Mart fiasco came up in a couple of presentations, and in conversation. There was also an interesting exchange at the breakfast sponsored by WebEx. The main points of the marketing vs. community debate seemed to be:
- A marketeer has as much of a license to market in the community as the community gives, and this license can be revoked at any time.
- A marketer should be transparent about their intentions for participating in or sponsoring a community.
- The pre-Cluetrain models of marketing no longer work nor are appropriate

Obviously this is a topic ripe for further discussion.

Some Companies Too Risk / Transparency Averse: I was a little surprised at the volume of questions about the pros and cons of engaging in community building activities. I'll just make a few blanket statements here Yes, your company needs to be blogging. It won't be as hard, take as much time or come with as much liability as you think it might. Further, you should think about making the electronic brochure that is your current web site a little more participatory (forums, content sharing?). For those of you who actually have online community offerings, how about not burying them 2 and 3 layers down on your web site?

ROI: Matthew Lees from the Patricia Seybold Group led a really interesting panel on the ROI (return on information) of online communities. He has a really great model, and I know he intends to post some of his slides so I won't try to paraphrase them. I will say that one of the points of value I forgot to mention in the discussion was that of comparative value. For instance, how much does it cost to blog vs. conducting a print advertising campaign? How much does it cost to host a discussion forum on a topic related to your business vs buying a tv spot?

Attention Saturation: Every day, more and more online experiences are vying for attention. From a supply and demand perspective, Joe or Jane Websurfer's attention seems to be getting to the point of being fully saturated, while new online social experiences are popping up every day. Something has to give, and it will likely result in destination site closures and/or consolidations.

I just ran across Kaneva, which appears to be Second Life with an "out of world" social network and video sharing.

Looks for lots more competition for Linden Labs this year.

In other virtual world news, check out the Virtual Worlds conference. Thanks for the link Kellie P.

John Hagel kicked off the Community 2.0 conference with a keynote titled "What's Possible? Expanding Markets Through Virtual Communities".

John says:

"I'm very encouraged about the commercial prospects of online communities."

Me too!

Patty Seybold is doing a ridiculously good job of blogging about the sessions, so I'm linking and I'm not going to try and provide in depth coverage. There's too much going on!

John Hagel's keynote On the Outside Innovation blog.

I have to admit, the experience of listening to John was a little surreal (in a good way). The taboo surrounding the word "community", that lasted for me personally from 2001 to 2005, seems to have lifted for most everyone.

What's changed? My personal opinion:

1. It's cheaper to engage in community-building activities. We've gone from 7 figure portals to free independent communities to 5 figure deployments for customer, large-scale sites.
2. It's faster to deploy. Days and weeks, not months or a year.
3. Community already exists. The fact is, your org or brand already has a community. If your customers aren't talking about your products or services online, you might be in big trouble
4. Passionate customers have an appetite for engagement online (and to varying degrees, the flavors of less passionate customers). Customers have an expectation that your company is available and "present" online.
5. The value is starting to be measurable

More later. The content at the conference has been really great, and sessions have been good. Hallway conversations have been better.

More soon.

Let's start with the shallow...

Jim and I just got to red rock in Las Vegas for the Community2.0 conference. Elvis' "Viva Las Vegas" always starts playing in my head about the time I'm halfway through the cab line. The must pipe it outside the airport so that I only pick up on it subliminally.

On to the, shall we say, less shallow:
I'm preparing for my the panel session tomorrow on "basic strategies for understanding business communities". The term "community ecosystem" has worked its way in to my notes as a way to describe the larger community context that any destination community site has to play in. Meaning... flickr is a community of users and content, but the brand and service that is flickr plays outside the confines of flickr.com. Also, Flickr community members are also members of dozens (if not hundreds) of other on and offline communities. It's important to consider the larger community context (ecosystem) when planning or refining strategy for any online community.

Anyway - thats the thinking as of 5pm, Vegas time.

More reports to follow!

The Online Community Expert Interview is a monthly series that features Online Community thought leaders driving online community strategy and practice at their companies. This month's interview features Steve Nelson from Clear Ink.

Steve's Bio:
Steve Nelson is the master juggler of all the disciplines that Clear Ink merges to create effective online communications. Steve brings the background of a seen-it-all entrepreneur, the discipline of a computer scientist, the spark of a marketer, and the time-tested temperament of a successful corporate executive. At Clear Ink, Steve's role is primarily in the area of digital marketing strategy and planning, ensuring that all our efforts roll up into a sound strategy and lead to a well-defined and high-quality execution.

Steve started his career in 1980 as a software engineer, Internet-enabling everything he could get his hands on. His first start-up, Kinetics, introduced the Macintosh to the Internet in 1985. Kinetics was ultimately bought by Novell, where Steve became VP and General Manager of the NetWare Clients Group.

Impressed (by playing too much Myst) at how much could be done with HyperCard, QuickTime, and a good 3D modeler, he became an independent software author and then cofounder of Kidwise, a learning software company. In this part of his career, Steve became deeply involved in the development, integration, and delivery of multimedia content.

When he cofounded Clear Ink, all of this previous experience was integrated into his self-described role as "keeper of the balance" between technology, marketing, strategy, and design.

Steve gets his inspiration from his wife and two children, who share that rare balance of art and science. In addition to his various outdoor distractions and obsession with Celine Dion, he has turned Web surfing into an art form and is this close to summarizing the whole damn thing in one sentence. He is a graduate of both UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley.

You've been working in the online community space for a number of years. What major online community and collaboration trends have you seen at your company? What has proven valuable and what hasn't?
As usual, it’s a trend-countertrend-synthesis dance, and if you hang around long enough, you see the pattern progress. You see communities emerge and coalesce on their own with whatever tools are available, then you see tools developed to make that experience better and then the tool leads the community. Then the community evolves and needs more capabilities so creates them on the fly. You see communities form themselves, and then vested organizations try to capture and lead the communities, and eventually an equilibrium happens based on mutual benefit. Until a new demand or technology kicks in, and you see the cycles repeat.

Do you have examples of a few major corporations / sites doing interesting things with online communities? Who are you paying attention to?
Without naming names, I’ve seen major corporations trying to game the emerging social media by “astroturfing”, or creating false grassroots communities, hiding the real interests or motivations. On the other hand, other corporations have sponsored communities in an open and transparent manner, making it clear who and why is behind it, but still enabling the community to exist. For example, Autodesk (which is a client of ours — see, I’m being transparent here), sponsored a blog related to the adoption of some of their new technologies. It helped their customers understand the challenges of technology adoption from a customer’s point of view, but didn’t try to hide the fact that Autodesk sponsored this forum.

Another example would be how conferences are extending themselves from a fixed-time event into year-round communities. Conferences chase attendees’ fixed budgets, but can differentiate themselves by moving from their few days in one physical venue into year-round communities using new online media. The TED Conference is oversubscribed for its annual 4 days in Monterey, but through the use of blogs, content-on-demand, community-building software and virtual spaces, the community can be more inclusive and year-round.

What are areas of growth in corporations in the use of online communities, from an investment, feature, or member growth perspective?
Successful corporations become large gravitational bodies, with communities forming in orbit around them. They form themselves, so what corporations can do is to foster their organic growth, not force it. Understand that they will be equal players at the table, respect them and let them thrive. See them as a knowledgebase, whose collective wisdom will help your own mission. They succeed when you succeed; you succeed when they succeed. It’s symbiotic. Deploy information tools that will support them as a community; collect, filter and deliver their emergent wisdom.

Clear Ink seems to have taken particular interesest in Second Life. Can you talk about the opportunities that you see in general, and examples of projects that you have done "in world"?
Second Life, and virtual worlds in general, are the next generation of interface to Internet-mediated communities. Because people share not only their words, but a 3-dimensional, mutually created space, their interactions are richer and more memorable. After an hour with a group in Second Life, you really remember being there, with them, and the bonds are stronger. We use Second Life both in the corporate space, fostering communities of practice as in the case of Autodesk; communities of interest, as in the case of our Second Life Capitol Hill, or communities that extend beyond their physical or temporal limitations, such as the TED Conference.

What should every CEO know about online communities?
They’re there first. Be grateful if there is a community related to your business, or especially to your company, because that means you’ve arrived. Now, don’t squander the opportunity. Do the dance: look at the tools they are using to make their community succeed; support and extend these tools, but turn them over to the community. Trust them. They’re your partners, not your puppets. Respect them, and you’ll do just fine.

As host of the Online Community Camp, Forum One is especially excited about the Unconference book project. For the uninitiated, an unconference is a conference with an agenda and sessions driven entirely by the attendees.

The following quote from this Biz 2.0 article sums up the spirit of an unconference:
"We figured there was much more expertise in the audience than there possibly could be onstage," says BarCamp co-founder Ryan King.

The wisdom of crowds in action.

It's exciting that someone is writing a book about unconferences and that the book is being authored collaboratively on the web via a wiki. The project originated in India, and the project team is encouraging global contributors.

Very cool.

The project's genesis was at Wiki Camp 07 held in Chennai, where the project was announced by Jimmy Wales. Kiruba has more background on Wiki Camp, and some really cool photos of Jimmy visiting his house on his blog.

Thanks to the Somewhat Frank blog for the Unconference book link.

A recent article in InformationWeek asks "Has Social Networking Gone Too Far?"

The article primarily focuses on the recently launched redesign of the USA Today web site. An overview article from the USA Today touts many participatory features, like content rating, multiple article sources, discussion groups and uploading photos.

From the article:

"While we've refined the design, we've also expanded the journalistic mission: Our ambition is to help readers quickly and easily make sense of the world around them by giving them a wider view of the news of the day and connecting them with other readers who can contribute to their understanding of events," wrote editor Ken Paulson and executive editors Kinsey Wilson and John Hillkirk.

While I think this is an interesting evolution of an "old media" brand experience, it ignores the larger community ecosystem. People belong to many communities and frequent mutiple websites, even for the similar information.

The problem USA Today faces is that it wants to own a conversation that already spans multiple Web sites. "I don't believe that people in general, even people who are really partial to particular media outlets, are going to want to have a closed social media experience around a single Web site," (Stew) Boyd (of Blue Whale Labs) says.

Another sign that the team at USA Today doesn't get it? I clicked on a link from their home page to read an article about the redesign and was greeted by a full screen graphical pharma ad. Firefox also informed me that it had blocked 2 popups.

Most companies that sincerely attempt to engage with their audiences online have an epiphany in the process: they realize that by listening to what their community really wants, acting upon it, and by meeting their community's needs they generate business value.

I hope USA Today is paying attention to their conversation (277 comments and counting).

Has Social Networking Gone Too Far? Not even close.

Is this the beginning of the inevitable consolidation that seems to be coming in the online community space?

First it was Five Apart, a community platform company. Yesterday Cisco announced it was buying Tribe. Thanks to Mukund for the heads up.

From TechCrunch:
"The hope is to use the two company’s technology to help Cisco’s corporate clients build their own social networks, so it isn’t clear whether or not the Tribe service itself will live on."

Just to give a hint at what is to come, check out Jeremiah Owyang's comments on the infrastructure field being overcrowded and his list of 37 white label services.

What's going to drive / driving the explosion in online community interest? Some companies are starting to see real, tangible value from their communities (read: ROI). Other companies are comfortable with the investment for affinity purposes, especially when the investment is compared to other programs like brand campaigns and advertising... or even the cost of simple, global marcomm web sites. The rest are struggling to figure out a strategy, or simply just don't care.

My belief is that every organization that values their business, brand equity and customer base will figure out some sort of an online engagement with their audience over the next 2-3 years. This engagement will be a bi-directional and networked style of communication that will involve a sincere attempt at relationship building. Scoble said something a couple of years ago about every corporate web site being replaced by a blog at some point (sorry, couldn't find the post). At the time, I thought he was nuts. Now I think, at least in spirit, he was 100% on the mark.

Update: Meaning, not blogs per say, but the bi-directional and networked engagement I mentioned above.

What do you think?