The topic of online community team organizational structures seems to be getting increasingly hot.

The two main questions seem to be:

• Where does the community team "belong" in a corporate structure?
• What are the roles on that team?

I've explored the former a couple of times, so I thought I would spend some time on the roles of the team, and in particular, the community manager. I would really love to hear what you think about this. I know leaving comments on this blog can be a bit of a pain (working on it), so if you have any issues, please email me.

The role of Community Manager seems to be evolving in the following ways:

• The role is less about moderation and more about product management.
Most thriving communities need little action by the moderators. Management tools are (in general) sufficient enough to combat spam, and most communities have empowered the members with tools to flag abusive or inappropriate posts. Simply put: with adequate and findable community guidelines, active moderation can (and should) be in the hands of the members. strategy, features, UX, platform, budgets, marketing (and a hundred other things). In short, very much like the role of a product manager.

• An expectation of communicating value (ROI) rather than stats
Community managers are now expected to not just report stats (page views, membership growth), but also to report on other points of value, and to contextualize that value, at least in part, in terms of progress on business goals.

• Community managers are expected to grow relationships with the influencers in the community
Community managers are increasingly expected to know who their lead members are, and what effect their influence has on other community members.

• Community managers should be thinking about "portability" of their team
In some companies, sources of community funding, and even the reporting structure of the community team is changing every few quarters. We live in evolutionary times, so it is good for community managers to reach out to senior staff on teams outside their immediate reporting structures.

In some cases, seasoned community managers are evolving into the Community Director, with several functions reporting in to him / her. My Community dream team would look something like this (YMMV):
• Moderators
• UX
• Analytics
• Content Manager / Community Editor
• Marketing
• Developer / Ops

I'd like to hear from the community managers out there. What are you experiencing in your day to day work? What am I missing here?

I host a local online community networking group in the Bay Area called the Online Community Roundtable. It's an informal, invitation-based event for local community managers and strategists.

Our latest installment was last night at SAP Labs in Palo Alto. A big thanks to Mario Herger and Mark Finnern from SAP for hosting the group, and for their continued support and participation.

We had a really great turn out, and lively discussion.

First, we are relaxing the "soft NDA" policy quite a bit. We are now asking participants to let other attendees know what shouldn't be blogged about. This will allow (I hope) a lot more content to come out of the sessions.

We always start the roundtables with a cocktail hour. During this time, we encourage folks who are going to lead a discussion to sign up "on the big board". Last night's topics included:

• Community Net Promoter Scores
  A discussion of the artice “The One Number You Need to Grow,” by Frederick Reichheld. Should community managers use net promoter scores to asses teh health of their communities? The discussion concluded that this was a helpful indicator, but that it should be used with other quanatative and qualatative data. Interesting article that responds to Reichhel's article here:
  http://www.greatbrook.com/customer_feedback_program.htm


• Building bridges to Academia
  Community managers might be interested in connecting with academics studying social media, social netowrks and specific measures of activity and value. This will only work if your org feel comfortable opening up your metrics to outsiders.


• How to Kick start a community, I hear it’s hard
  A discussion about how to grow a community, and how to determine logical target size. The interesting bit for me was the various measures of customer base vs. community membership. These ranged from 1% to 25%.


• The road to vibrancy
  This session was combined with the session above. On the fly. Mashup-style. Becuase that's how we roll at the roundtable.


• Injecting “controversy” within the community –Why it’s not always bad
  I had a hard time following this discussion, but I think the net of it was that sometimes it's an interesting marketing tactic to intentionally stir up contreversy in order to feature your service or product. The discussion also went in to the idea of tolerance around controversial content and personalities in a community (encouraged).


• Scaling Community
  This discussion revisited the previous topic around logical community size, and techniques to scale up membership, participation and content.

Other Interesting tidbits:

Time / value as a metric: This applies to "hanging out" on news pages, twitter, or in virtual worlds. A proposed metrics around time invested, vs value returned per minute. I have no idea how you would quantify value (maybe member self-reporting?), but I found this though-provoking.

Logical community size: How do you determine a logical community size for a community? Having an existing customer base is helpful, but what about startups that are soley focused on growing communities? What is the equation to determine this? I generally advise clients with existing customer bases that 1-10% of base converting registered membership is great. This is mostly based on my experience.

Aesthetics for Social Applications: I'm a recovering UX guy at heart, so when the discussion turns to design, I'm all ears. Christina Wodtke made a really great point that succesful social applications tend to have a "signs of life" feature, which is essentially a news feed of activity. Think facebook or twitter.

Corporate Rebels DO get it: I would hazard to guess that there are "pockets of resistance" in even the most stodgy corporate environments that are doing everything they can to connect the org and the customer through social experiences. I keep hearing that most companies "don't get it". Ok, sure. This keeps those of us consulting in the community / social media space in business. But I constantly meet people at these supposed clueless corporations who are fighting tooth and nail to get the execs to listen. These are my peeps, as I count myself as one of their lot while I was at Autodesk. The fact that we had 15 people who were mostly from these "clueless companies" spending time after hours discussing how to better serve their respective communities gives me hope that we are on the right track.

Thanks again to everyone who participated in the amazing discussions last night.

Jeremiah O blogged about this as well on the Web Strategist blog. (highly recommend / read it daily)

We created an Online Community Roundtable group on Facebook.

Are you interested in doing a local Roundtable? If so, I'd be happy to discuss how I can help support this.

I initiated the Marketing & Online Community research study in June of 2007, as a function of the Online Community Research Network. The study was conceived as an investigation into the current state of marketing to online communities, from the perspective of both the online community host, as well as from the perspective of a marketer.

We had over 60 completed surveys, and participants included large software companies, large community destination sites, niche community sites, platform providers and interactive marketing and advertising firms.

One of the most interesting findings from the study actually surfaced early in the process. We discovered that while community hosts and practitioners were willing to share their experiences, most marketers were not. After several in-person interviews, it became clear that most marketing and advertising agencies have not met with great success in their community marketing efforts, and are generally unwilling to talk about their experiences to date.The responses from the marketer’s perspective are proportionally less than those from the community host's, but the insights provided are still of high value.

From the community host's perspective, one of the most surprising takeaways was that community hosts were still largely relying on banner and text ads as their main marketing and advertising vehicles.

I've included 2 of the most relevant question summaries from the report below:

Q: What types of marketing and advertising activity do you support on your community sites?
Summary: Banner and text ads were the most common forms of marketing activity, followed by RSS, branded content and surveys. There was activity indicated on most categories of community marketing, which seems to indicate willingness on the part of online community hosts and practitioners to experiment with new forms of marketing to their communities. Virtual world storefronts and sponsored podcasts scored surprisingly low, given the media attention in the last 6-9 months.















Q: Is advertising targeting available on your site? If so, please select all options that apply.
Summary: Run of site and contextual targeting were available on the majority of respondent’s sites. More sophisticated technologies, like behavioral and demographic targeting were only available on a few of the respondents communities. Given that there is generally a large amount of demographic data available in a community members profile, it would seem that there is a large opportunity to engage in more sophisticated ad targeting on sites currently just offering run of site or contextual targeting.















The Marketing & Online Communities report is published by the Online Community Research Network, a collaborative research series for online community professionals. If you would like to learn more about the Marketing & Online Communities research report, or more about the Online Community Research Network, please visit the OC Research Network home page.

Note: If you contact Conor, please let him know you saw the posting on the OC Report!


Sr. Community Manager
Palo Alto, CA
Recruiter: cobrien@vmware.com

Position Description
The Community Manager guides, develops and manages communities of interest that attract and encourage conversation about VMware’s technology, solutions and programs. These communities bring together VMware’s customers, employees, and partners in a multi-channel environment, both face-to-face and online, and encourage open feedback and participation across all these groups.

Responsibilities
• Serve as the primary point of contact for multiple VMware communities and provide best practice guidance in the areas of content and service development, event programming, online facilitation, member outreach, etc.

• Drive to completion, from investigation to delivery, initiatives that use community, social networking, and other technologies to increase community participation.

• Develop and post interactive content that encourages participation and the development of member-generated content to ensure that the community is achieving its objectives

• Drive processes that encourage member-to-member interaction, as well as community-initiated and VMware-initiated interactions between community members and VMware.

• Lead the day-to-day operations of the hosted community in conjunction with internal community owners

• Monitor and moderate community participation to ensure that rules of engagement are adhered to assist in the development of the Community platform and ensuring that it meets the objectives of the VMware Communities

• Provide tracking and metrics to communicate and validate the Community interaction

Requirements
• Bachelors degree in business; MBA a plus

• 7+ years experience in Online Product Marketing / Management, Communities or Self Service Support Programs in a high tech company

• Overwhelming passion for today's social networking and collaboration technologies

• Experience building online interaction among members of a large-scale technical community around novel and complex technologies.

• Experience with, and passion for, creating and consuming new content types: websites, blogs, podcasts, wikis, etc.

• Specific experience identifying and utilizing appropriate content streams: transcripts, articles, surveys, web seminars, podcasts, wikis, blogs, etc.

• Expertise in a subscription-based product or service company (preferably in an emerging market)

• Equally comfortable making a customer presentation and creating content for the community

• Strong interpersonal skills with a desire to work cross-functionally and in teams

• Proven history of developing new, sustainable processes

• A self-starter with the willingness, and desire, to "roll up your sleeves" and get the job done

• Preference for working in a fast paced, entrepreneurial, start-up environment

This month's Online Community Expert interview is with Jake McKee of Ant's Eye View. Jake is only a few weeks in to the new practice with Ant's Eye View, so I really appreciated him taking time out for the interview.


Jake's Bio:
Jake McKee is an evangelist for online and offline community building, social media, and customer-company interaction. He has been working with online communities, fan groups, and consumer groups since the early days of the Internet, and has a rich background in Web development, community management, business strategy, and product development.

Jake is the Principal at Ant's Eye View, a Dallas-based social media and customer engagement consultancy. In a past life, Jake was the Global Community Relations Specialist for the LEGO Company, where he spent five years on the front lines of customer-company interaction.


You recently opened a new practice. Can you tell us about what prompted you to start AntsEyeView, and what the company intends to deliver?

First off, thanks for the invite. I’m a big fan of the Online Community Report blog, so to see my name there is a big deal to me.

Ant’s Eye View is a consulting practice focused on helping organization form honest-to-goodness relationship with their audiences. From Social Media training to community strategy to day to day fan relations, we do absolutely everything in a very small niche. This is a continuation of the work I’ve done for may years for brands like LEGO, Dr Pepper, FX Networks, Woodford Reserve, and others.

We’re already working on a number of cool projects, and are about to close several more. Stay tuned at antseyeview.com for details.


You've been working in the online community space for a number of years. What major online community and social media trends have you seen in your practice over the last 12 months?

Yeah, I remember pitching clients on social aspects to Web sites in 1996. You know, the days when they said things like “Please take our email address off the site, we’re worried we might get too much feedback from customers”.

The last 12 months or so has been an interesting time to do what I do. 12 months ago, I was having lots of conversations with clients and potential clients where they were asking us to first explain what all this social media and community stuff was about. In many cases, we were helping to support our client contacts within an organization to pitch it or explain it to their colleagues and managers.

Lately, it seems like that “pitch” isn’t there – they know they want to do something, their bosses expect them to do something, they’re just not really sure what to do or how to get started. I talk to a lot more business professionals with their own Facebook profiles, and who joke about playing with Twitter, posting Amazon reviews, and any number of other online social activities. These same types of people a year ago were brushing off social concepts because “MySpace is ugly and meant for teens”.

But even as this awareness grows and the tools get better and better (anyone seen Facebook lately??), we still advise our clients of the same thing we have for years: build relationships, don’t implement tools. Relationships are the crucial part of any “social” activity, whether online or offline, whether business focused or personal. Certainly tools may be part of building relationships, but that’s a sub-task, not a main task. Building new tools is fun, certainly. It’s the best way to get the “Rush of the Reveal” - that amped up feeling you get when you can unveil something. But success is sexier, or at least it should be. And success is often minor change that has huge impact, or changing someone’s opinion of an organization by listening and responding to their concerns.

I tend to find great value in small functionality. I am working on a top secret project with LEGO right now where we’ve involved 50 consumers from all over the world in work together on a new project. Our tools? Free, open source, and perfectly suited for the task at hand.

Do you have examples of a few major corporations / sites doing interesting things with online communities? Who, from a corporate perspective, are you paying attention to? What about individual practitioners or agencies?

It’s a bummer than once enough people start saying how great a great product is, it’s no longer kosher to continue talking about how cool that thing is. I’ve been amazed at 37signal’s Basecamp product. I’ve used it for groups large and small to help keep development on track and groups, often of people who have never worked together, participating in the process. It works wonderfully. Companies of all sizes seem to be using this easy, basic tool to get through the day.

Other examples:

Walmart adds reviews – As Andy points out, the fact that you can now review anything in the Walmart.com catalog, even a toothbrush is a major advancement.
http://www.damniwish.com/2007/07/a-landmark-mome.html

AMC’s Mad Men Blog – I’m very impressed with how effectively selected the content is that goes into this blog. It’s a perfect mix of fun stuff for fans of the show, new and old, hardcore and just passing through. It’s not a sales pitch, and it’s not too detailed either.

Nikon is doing amazing things with their blogger relations program. Imagine the kind of support and attention you get when you send out a $1400 camera to a blogger with the directive to “take pictures, blog if you like”. Those I’ve talked to about the program, who had gotten one, were truly impressed and have promoted their “new friends at Nikon” quite a bit. Here I am talking about them (as a jealous by-stander, even).

Intel & Battlefield 2 – Intel funded the development of a custom, new map for the mostly unsupported Battlefield 2. EA has nearly walked away from this game after releasing their next gen of the franchise, Battlefield 2142. (The last post on the EA Battlefield 2 site was in October 2006). Thing is, there’s still a large, dedicated group of BF2 fans out there. For a community feeling ignored and forgotten, Intel scored huge points with a large group of gamers by delivering something offbeat, but coveted. Gamers didn’t cry “marketer!”, instead thanking Intel for propping up the lagging support.

One other thing I’m paying lots of attention to these days is my buddy Lee. Lee runs Common Craft (www.commoncraft.com) and has been using the PaperWorks concept to create some truly exceptional video content describing in a few minutes fairly complex concepts.

Honestly, I think the agency world is lagging behind. Sadly, I’m hearing many more interesting programs coming out of brand managers than from ad/marketing/pr agencies. Remember when the agencies pushed the client, not the other way around?


What are areas of growth in corporations in the use of online communities, from an investment, feature, or member growth perspective?

I almost hesitate to talk about the opportunity for the growth of the use of online communities. I’d much rather talk about how corporations are going to do better at listening to their consumers first. We get so caught up in the Rush of the Reveal, that we think far too much about the tools and not enough about the long term, or heck, short term relationship.

What should every CMO of VP of Marketing know about online communities?

They are made up of people. This seems silly to even bring up, but honestly it’s hard to remember. I hear more people within organizations saying things like weirdo, freak, strange, “too much time”. Communities are driven by emotion, whether in support of tragedy, or growth of a hobby, it’s being part of something bigger, connecting with other people that truly shapes involvement in community groups. Treat a community like a dinner party, as my buddy Lee always says. You wouldn’t show up uninvited, you wouldn’t jump into a group conversation without figuring out the tone and content of the conversation, and you wouldn’t leave without thanking your host. Observe, ask questions, offer to help, then ask for favors.

If you are currently developing your company's online community strategy, and are struggling with all of the options available to you, a project to benchmark your discussion group experience is a great place to start. The members of your discussion groups will likely not only contain your most ardent evangelists (and probably most vocal critics), but will also contain the DNA to a more mature community strategy.

The intention of the benchmark is to look at the following areas:

1. Member Experience: Do members feel like they are getting what they need, in a way only your organization can deliver?
2. Community Strategy and Management: Does your organization have clear goals around your discussion groups? Is the community being managed to these goals?
3. Technology: Is your technology platform supporting member needs and community goals? Is it capable of evolving?

Community Strategy and Management could arguably be broken out into 2 separate sections, but based on several conversations I've had of late, the role of community management, and specifically, the community manager is evolving. It's not just about moderation anymore. The new role of the community manager is to actually manage all dimensions of the community experience (moderation, UX, funding, metrics, etc).

The benchmarking project would be made up of several smaller sub projects and data gather exercises, specifically:

1. Benchmarking User Experience
- Member Satisfaction: Conduct a web-based survey to ask members about the quality of the user experience, feedback on the quality of message exchange, the level and appropriateness of moderation, the level of participation by members of your organization, and finally, would they recommend your discussion groups to their peers? Finally, ask about additional features or community touch-points members would like to see from you, including blogs and social networking. 50 to 100 responses to this survey would be a great baseline. For more sophisticated organizations, tying this survey into any sort of customer satisfaction, loyalty or brand-tracking research you are doing will be quite insightful. At Autodesk, we found that are Discussion GRoup members were more loyal customers than non-members.
- Usability: Gather 5-6 members from your community and have them walk you through the main interactions points they use on your discussion groups. This can be done in person, or over a web conference like WebEx or ReadyTalk.
- Find-ability: Gathering this data is very straightforward. You want to answer the following questions: Is your discussion group content showing up in google? Available from you site via RSS? How many clicks from the main flows of your corporate site?

2. Benchmarking Community Strategy and Management
- Budget: What is your total cost for hosting discussion groups? This includes staff time, moderation, license fees, hosting fees, bandwidth and any marketing you do. The other side of the coin? Who's paying? Do you have a defined sponsor for the program, or are you asking for money quarter over quarter? Identifying additional potential sponsors helps smooth out quarterly-based funding, and also gives you a bigger checkbook for updates and platform extensions.
- Moderation: Review your moderation program. Do you have lead members assisting the moderator(s)? You should. Do you have clear and available discussion guidelines? Do your moderators have to directly intervene in the groups several times a week? A high level of moderator intervention is a big red flag that something is not working.
- Metrics & Reporting: What data are you reporting back to management? A big red flag here is "none". That means you aren't doing a good job of communicating value (bad), or your management team doesn't care (even worse). What types of metrics are you reporting? Unique visitors and page views are great. Membership growth and attrition is better. Showing engagement via member participation numbers is really good. It's also possible to do a rudimentary level of "word of mouth" reporting by highlighting key threads that net out the key issues for the period of time you are reporting against.
- Internal participation: What is the current level of participation by your organization in your groups? If it is low, you are going to hear about it loud and clear in the Member Satisfaction survey mentioned above.
- Member outreach: Do you have any sort of program in place to highlight, reward or otherwise engage your most active participants? Some call this an MVP or Lead User program.

3. Assessing Technology
Caveat: I'm not a technologist, so I would recommend getting very friendly with your web team or operations staff to help you with this part of the project
- Performance: The 2 things you are looking for here are 1. Are the groups available 99% of the time? Significant downtime because of maintenance or database issues can wreak havoc on a communities health. 2. How fast do the pages load? Ideally you are getting sub 5 seconds (at least).
- Scalability: If your traffic and participation doubled tomorrow, could your current system handle it? Again, take your favorite systems geek out to lunch and get their opinion.
- Cost: The platform market has become VERY competitive. There are a number of vendors that have evolved their platforms beyond just discussions over the last few years. Now is an excellent time to review your existing contracts, and to re-shop your platform provider.

Once you make it to this point, you will have a massive amount of data. Because of the nature of this exercise, you will also have checked in with your membership base to guide any additional augmentations to your community, as well as the folks internally who can help fund and participate in the next generation of your community.

Now the fun starts.
You will have almost certainly uncovered opportunities to refine your existing discussion groups presence, and you likely tapped into unmet needs your members are expressing. You will almost certainly have uncovered ways in which your organization is coming up short by the amount or type of participation in your community. Lastly, you will have a good idea of current vendor capabilities with regard to their platforms. In short, you will likely have all the data you need to plan and sell a project to your management team that entails extending your current discussion group-based community experience.

The two most logical and easiest ways to extend your discussion group-base community presence are blogs and social networking.

Blogging: Corporate blogs have been in the mainstream for a good while now, but I'm still surprised by the lack of product and industry-based blogs with some of our clients. Blogs tie in nicely with discussion groups when staff that are currently participating in discussions start blogs to highlight trends in the groups, or to give members of the groups deeper insight into that persons role at the host organization, and also that persons personality and day to day life.

Social Networking: Another great way to extend a discussion group-based experience is to add social networking to the groups. This option is available in most of the latest versions of discussion software, and essentially involves creating a richer member profile, allowing members to expose their profile page, and allowing other members to browse, find and connect with them. Not only does adding social networking features add a dimension of personality to the groups, at can also support offline analogs, like in person user groups.

The takeaway: most companies could be doing a better job with their discussion groups, and could be providing and receiving more value from the current investment. Further, discussion groups provide a logical path towards engaging in more sophisticated online community building activities.

The folks at Common Craft have put together another great "in plain English" video. This time, it is on Social Bookmarking.

Enjoy!

The Online Community Metrics 2007 research report has been posted on the Online Community Research Network. You can download the report from the OCRN home page.

Some of the most significant findings published in this study include:

• Metrics options: a wide-ranging list of new and different metrics which respondents found valuable apart from the norm of page visits and unique visitors.

• Desired metrics: a valuable wish list that has been complied by online community professionals for online community professionals.

• Tools for collecting metrics: a highlighted graph on data collected to see what the best services, tools and techniques are for collecting and analyzing online community data.

• Demonstrating ROI: Quantifying the value of community efforts for management.

• Advice: Top tips accumulated for community managers concerning best practice metrics.

Our research is predicated on the belief that the best source for information regarding online communities continues to be other online community professionals. A quote from the report:

“Numbers tell a story, but numbers only tell part of the story. Metrics are important – page views, new threads & posts, etc all tell you hard growth facts. But part of community is organic -- how the culture is developing, how many people are forming deeper relationships with each other -- these are important things for community growth that can’t be measured.”

Again, the full report can be downloaded from the Online Community Research Network home page: http://www.onlinecommunityresearch.com

This research study is conducted as part of the recently launched Online Community Research Network (OCRN).

The OCRN is a collaborative research effort of online community professionals to better understand the challenges of building and managing online communities. You can find more information on the OCRN home page, if you are interested.

Enjoy the report!

The latest issue of Wired has a an article that takes a not so flattering view of Second Life, and of several large brands that have tried to open up shop in the virtual world. The title says it all: "How Madison Avenue Is Wasting Millions on a Deserted Second Life"

One of the things you never see in Second Life is a genuine crowd — largely because the technology makes it impossible. ... Created by an underfunded startup using a physics engine that's now years out of date, Second Life is made up of thousands of disconnected "regions" (read: processors), most of which remain invisible unless you explicitly search for them by name. ... And even the popular islands are never crowded, because each processor on Linden Lab's servers can handle a maximum of only 70 avatars at a time; more than that and the service slows to a crawl, some avatars disappear, or the island simply vanishes.

The article goes on to cite several examples of failed or failing storefronts, including coke, H&R block and Toyota. The author chalks the willingness by marketers to experiment with second life to the fact that traditional marketing techniques are essentially failing.

"A terror has gripped corporate America," says Joseph Plummer, chief research officer at the Advertising Research Foundation, an industry think tank. Plummer has been around Madison Avenue since the early '60s, when modern advertising techniques materialized. "The simple model they all grew up with" — the 30-second spot, delivered through the mass reach of television — "is no longer working. And there are two types of people out there: a small group that's experimenting thoughtfully, and a large group that's trying the next thing to come through the door."

It's pretty easy to come up with examples of silly ideas (at least in hindsight) or poor execution. What about presences in second life that actually work? Before I left Autodesk, I was shown what I still consider the best application of the technology that I've seen to date. Warning: It's a pretty modest and practical application.

Crescendo Design, an architectural firm in Wisconsin, is using SL to model their home designs, experiment with renewable energy, and walk clients through potential designs. The demo I got about a year ago just blew me away. You can screenshots of their work in SL here.

The interesting thing about Second Life residents is that they REALLY love it. I'm not sure that it's possible for real world brands to come inworld have a meaningful interaction with the residents without changing somethign about their real world product or marketing formula (ex: coke machines in second life?!?).

What do you think? Have you seen examples of companies large or small using having success doing business in a virtual world?