We are less than 48 hours from the Online Community Unconference East (yeah!). This is the third year we've run the Online Community Unconference in New York, and we've had great events both years.

On think I wanted to be a bit more mindful of for this year's Unconference was to really be mindful of focusing the group's energy on specific outcomes. Our theme for this year's Uncoference reflects this intention:

"Moving forward, together"

We will use the theme as a guiding principle for the sessions on Wednesday, and ask that participants think about what is needed to move forward personally, professionally, and to move community and social media forward as an industry. We will also explore what progress (moving forward) looks like.

Our notional topic list from the Unconference wiki (which will be open to the public after the Unconference) reflects the "moving forward" intention:

• Online Community & Social Media Metrics: Getting to Standards
  
• Monetizing industry communities (not related to a single brand or company)
  
• The Community Team: Roles, Responsibilities, Job Descriptions and Reporting Structures
  
• Using Community and Collaboration Tools Within the Enterprise
  
• Lessons Learned: Pitfalls and Best Practices in Community-Building
  
• How to hire community & Social Media staff
  
• Online Presence: Creating a social strategy on and beyond your domain
  
• "Social Shopping" Communities (focus on online brand advocacy, product reviews and ratings, "social" information search, etc.)
  
• Leaving (too many) online footprints in (too many) communities
  
• How to interest and keep volunteers in a commercial environment?
  
• Beyond "Listening" - Comprehensive Community & Social Media monitoring and engagement
  
• Community and Social Media reporting and insights
  
• Case Studies for the class of 2009: Successful community engagements and social media campaigns from 2009 (bring yours to share)
  
• Validation: Do verified accounts make a difference in communities for better engagement?
  

There are still tickets available for the Unconference. For more information (including attendee list), please go here:
http://ocue2010.eventbrite.com/

I'll start with a caveat: this is a flat out, unapologetic (but hopefully entertaining) pitch. That's me in the photo below, the unapologetic pitcher.

As you know, Forum One is hosting the Online Community Unconference East in New York City on February 10th. The Unconference is an open space gathering of online community and social media professionals from the commercial and non profit sectors. We expect over 200 participants (our biggest east coast event yet).

A partial list of organizations coming includes AARP, Answers.com, Autodesk, Bloomberg, Cisco, Consumer Reports, Examiner.com, Google, HP, Huffington Post, IBM, iVillage / NBC, kgb, Microsoft, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Scotttrade and TripAdvisor (to name a few). Pretty great group, no?

The Pitch - 3 Reasons
We feel like our Unconference events represent one of the best sponsorship values for events around, for three main reasons:

1. Fantastic (but appropriate) Visibility
As a sponsor, you will receive the "normal" event perks - your logo on conference materials, acknowledgement at the event, a sponsor banner. The key to our sponsors' success is that we don't oversell our sponsorships, and we limit the number of service providers attending the event so that the ratio of practitioners to service providers is favorable (which also makes for a better attendee experience). You will also have an opportunity to address the full conference for 5 minutes shortly after lunch. In short: Limited competition for attention, you are free to participate as an attendee, and you get the events full attention shortly after lunch.

2. Good Value
Our packages start at $5k, with our premiere package at $10k. Many events with smaller, less qualified audiences charge twice that, and typically try to cram in as many sponsors in as possible.

3. Attendees are Senior Staff and Have Purchase Power / Influence
Forum One has been hosting online community and social media events for almost 10 years. Over the years, we have curated a very senior network of community practitioners and executives. Most of the attendees at our conferences have direct purchase influence, and many have purchase authority. Business gets done at our events between sponsors and attendees.

That's it in a nutshell: great event, great visibility, solid value and an awesome attendee list.

I want to be clear about our intentions with sponsorship sales: sponsorship helps us continue to run these events at a modest profit, which ensures a sustainable business. By sponsoring, you help support the larger community of social media and online community professionals.

Thanks for listening to my pitch. I really do appreciate your time and attention.

If you are interested in discussing terms, please contact me and Chloe Caviness (our sales manager).

Now back to our regularly scheduled community programing

This month's Online Community Expert interview is with Rawn Shah, Practice lead with the Social Software Adoption team in IBM. He has worked in various roles as a software developer, production manager, a journalist and community program manager in his career. His current focus is on understanding and measuring business value of social computing within the enterprise. As a writer and journalist he has written or contributed to over 280 articles and 7 books, including his latest Social Networking for Business (Wharton School Press, 2010) released this January and available through Amazon and other bookstores and retailers.

Q: What excites you most about your current community work?

Working across the IBM enterprise, we have a fairly extensive network of social ecosystems involving hundreds of thousands of members across many geographical regions. It allows me to investigate the differences in how people use social software and participate in online communities from different job roles, cultures, languages, and attitudes. Within the 400,000 or so employees in IBM, there are several thousand communities of various combinations of users. In addition, social software is receiving a great deal of interest and support from our executives and managers, which makes my job significantly easier. It opens the opportunities to work with smart people in the CIO Infrastructure and Innovation organizations, IBM Research, the many product groups, and social software developers and users worldwide. In my focus on metrics and business value, there is so much social computing going on that we have tons of data provides truly invaluable research and analysis opportunities. I certainly also have the freedom to work with brilliant minds outside the company, and wherever I go, the IBM brand helps to open the way. People want to know what we are thinking and doing and that makes me feel useful. I get the best of both worlds.

Q: How are the areas of internal collaboration (a.k.a. Enterprise 2.0), Online Community and Social Media intersecting in your work?

While I work primarily on internal collaboration these day--in contrast to my prior job as Community Program Manager for our external developerWorks community--I brainstorm weekly with my peers focused on social media and marketing on topics ranging from metrics to tactics to governance. What this brings is different perspectives on how internal and external collaboration consider business value and what they count as metrics.

For example, internally we have a closed, albeit large, population of users where we know all the individuals involved. Therefore our internal metrics can be focused down to the activities of specific groups and populations of individuals--we avoid getting down to specific individuals to protect privacy. In other words, we can get data on how all people in, for example, sales roles globally or even in a specific region, use social software applications. Externally however, the population is much more mixed and rarely do we have data per specifically identified people. This leads us to very different types of behavioral information: internally we can categorize users by their level of participation (zero, low, medium, high, elite) in our social environments, and then examine the actions or distribution of these members across the geographies. With the external environment, social media monitoring tools and services from other companies allow us to take the pulse of activity along different topics. We then have to infer behavior based on the level of interest in topics across the Web.

That is not the only intersection of course. Very often we have IBMers who are active in social environments within our company as well as externally in many different levels or roles in the company. They do this on a personal or even a professional basis for their own reasons but the key value is that they help to communicate ideas back and forth. There is no hard communications firewall or who is allowed to speak but we do have official blogs and sources, and social computing guidelines for all other employees.

Q: Can you talk about the evolving role of online communities at IBM?

Online communities have existed inside IBM in many shapes and forms for decades. The oldest began as instruments to share wide-scale announcements across business units, as well as specific interest discussions in newsgroups. We went from a multitude separate systems at the department level towards standard online community and collaboration services from the CIO’s organization.

Today most online communities and social computing systems are available commonly across our global intranet. It has changed from being regional discussions that isolated who was talking to whom to global venues. Local discussions and communities still continue of course, but there are no artificial borders for the majority of our systems.

Our challenge today is more in trying to figure out ways of working across the differences in cultures and attitudes: job-role specific cultures, geographical or national cultures, and generational cultures. This is ongoing work to learn and understand and, in my view, likely something that will never end. This challenge is what keeps communities isolated, whether in the physical world or online.

In the past two years, we have looked substantially into how social computing fits into many different core business processes. Using social media and computing for marketing is becoming quite common in many businesses. IBM applies social computing into our innovation process both internal and with customers to discover new opportunities, business areas or products to focus on through social brainstorming methods. We use it in many different steps of the sales process to mine and manage opportunities, work on request for proposals from customers, present and confer on options for customers. IBM Research uses it to prepare and present at conferences, investigate ideas for patents, and collaborate across research teams. We also use it to identify and discover skills and expertise across our 400,000 employees across the dozens of countries in which IBMers are located across the world. Even our HR and Learning organizations are investigating how to shift from formal classroom and module-based education to the informal mechanisms of online communities.

The general feeling is that social computing is now finding its way into improving the core way we do business, from everyday interactions to complex decisions. While the software is there to help us manage how we interact, the core issue is still on learning how to improve how people interact with each other to productive ends.

Q. What is the most valuable online community or social media touchpoint for IBM that provides clear and compelling value to both your customer and IBM?

I’d say its IBM developerWorks, our community for developers, designers and software users. We have about 7 to 8 million registered members who take part in the community, and learn from IBM as well as each other. In particular, I use MydeveloperWorks as the home for my external blog as well as some of the communities in which I participate. This customized Lotus Connections environment integrates the learning environment of developerWorks with its community mechanisms to present and distribute ideas. Members from IBM, our partners, customers and even non-customers create blogs, forums and other communities as relevant to the many topics covered in developerWorks.

To IBM, it serves to support the many topics around the different technologies and products across the IBM software portfolio, as well as serve as a channel towards becoming product users. While this community is not filled with marketing messages, the marketing groups provide offerings to the members, and track these tactics, thereby integrating the online community alongside the other standard marketing processes in the company.


Q: What role do you feel online communities play for businesses, in the context of the current economic environment?

I think people across the world have now solidly felt the impact of adversities to the vast network of business factors as a result of globalization. Now more than ever we are interdependent of each other, and our successes depend on how well we work with our relationships and how we deliver to them. Online communities are a manifestation of these relationships, allowing us to feel the pulse of the community as it happens. The advantages that online environments offer relative to their offline counterpart is a wider scale of relationship networks, faster communications out to your network, and better tracking of your history of interactions. If you’re not participating in the online communities that matter to your business, then you become that person at a party who’s perennially asking “What did I miss?” This impacts your character and your brand both as an individual and per the organization you represent.

Regardless of the economic environment, online communities are also the trend towards a new approach to working with people both within and beyond the organization. Gary Hammel refers to this as Management 2.0 but that word, “management” itself is a legacy artifact. Rather than hierarchical reporting structures in most organizations, it is closer to partnerships with individuals both on your team and outside it. This trend towards partnering depends strongly on influencing opinions and shepherding ideas to get results; quite different than handing out assignments. It also applies to different models of conducting tasks or projects and knowing what approach works in each model. The structure of such institutional changes and business models are the core of my book Social Networking for Business (Wharton School Press, 2010).


Q: What advice would you have for a beginning community manager?

Community management is both a learnable skill and a personality trait. The best community managers (CMs) that I know have survived the long term are active listeners, strong relationship builders, and see themselves as a voice for the members. They are resourceful people and always looking to find ways how members can help others rather than trying to be gatekeepers or central clearinghouses of information. CMs generally “work” for the sponsor, whether officially or otherwise. They voice the ideas, feelings and pulse of the community to the sponsoring organization, but they are also not “willows” who bend entirely to the will of the community.

As a new CM it is important to understand not just how you are to serve people, but also what you need to produce or deliver and how to measure them. If these are countable in distinct ways, then you have a way to capture metrics. Otherwise, if these are qualitative ideas and results, then you have relevant stories that may be representative or repeated across the community. My suggestion when it comes to metrics is to look for repeatable ideas or artifacts relative to what your community is doing. They should be meaningful towards delivering the end business goals, even if they are only parts of the whole picture.

Again, Rawn's book "Social Networking for Business" is available at Amazon and other booksellers.

The Online Community Unconference East will be held February 10th in New York City. To learn more about the event, or to register, go here: http://ocue2010.eventbrite.com/ .

So, how does this Unconference thing work?
The premise of our Unconference series is that the best source of information on online communities and social media is the community of practitioners actually doing the hands on work. The Unconference format provides a venue for participants to lead discussions about topics they are most passionate and knowledgeable about. At the end of the day, attendees walk away with new ideas, perspectives, and a long list of new professional connections.

One of the most amazing parts of the day at our Unconferences is the topic selection process. Our Unconference uses the organizing principals of Open Space Technology to create the event agenda. Said another way, the topics discussed during the day are suggested and lead by Unconference attendees. At the start of the morning, any attendee who wishes can come forward, announce a topic, and claim one of the 50+ open slots on the grid.

Attendees announce session topics


The agenda begins to form


Within about 35-40 minutes the grid fills up with topics


Once all the topics are announced, we begin the Unconference sessions. The agenda grid plays the role of gathering place and ideamarketplace throughout the day, as attendees come back to the agenda to check for any updates, changes, or new sessions.

Outputs
If you would like to see an example of the great content that comes out of an Unconference, please check out a few of these resrouces:

• The Online Community Unconference 2009 wiki
  
• The The Online Community Unconference East 2009 wiki
  
• The Online Community Unconference 2009 Book of Procedings (.pdf)

I would encourage you to spend some time looking through the session notes and the book of proceedings, as there is a lot of great content.

Pictures from the Online Community Unconference East 2009


Again, to learn more about the event, or to register, go here: http://ocue2010.eventbrite.com/.

Last Friday, Jeremiah Owyang had a simple question: Is there a national day recognizing the work of Community Managers? The question spawned a conversation, which spawned a proposal for the day of recognition:

That days is today. Happy Community Manager Appreciation Day!

Every fourth Monday in January will be Community Manager Appreciation Day.

Community Managers have a challenging and exciting role. One the one hand, they are called on to be the personification of their organization to the online communities that they manage. One the other hand, they are also charged with being the advocate for the community back to the organization. Sort of like a benevolent double agent. The role of the community manager is evolving quickly as well, and we are starting to see the “swiss army knife” aspects of the role mature in to distinct roles on the community team: community product manager, moderator, internal community manager, social media manager, social ux designer, and many more disciplines.

We should take time to celebrate the folks doing the hands on work of shaping, supporting and nurturing online communities.

Background about Community Manager Appreciation Day from Jeremiah’s blog:

Now, Recognize A Community Manager, Every 4th Monday of January
While we agree with common manners to always thank someone after they’ve helped you, just take a moment to pause.. and think. Why would someone willingly go through the above mentioned challenges? Because of their passion to improve the company, and help customers have a better relationship. In many cases, a genuine ‘thank you’ can mean more than a yearly customer satisfaction survey. Take the time to recognize and thank the community manager that may have helped you while you during your time of need.
If you’re a customer, and your problem was solved by a community manager be sure to thank them in the medium that helped you in. Use the hashtag #CMAD.
If you’re a colleague with community manager, take the time to understand their passion to improve the customer –and company experience. Copy their boss.
If you’re a community manager, stop and breathe for a second, and know that you’re appreciated. Hug your family.
This isn’t just about a single role, but a bigger trend of making product and services more efficient, and thereby our world a little bit more efficient and sustainable.

I happily endorsed this proposal along with the following community leaders Jeremiah pulled together over the weekend:

Connie Benson, Rachel Happe, Jake McKee, Sean O’Driscoll, Lane Becker, Dawn Foster, Thor Muller, Amy Muller and Jeremiah Owyang.

This post is part of an ongoing series about developing an online community strategy. As a reminder, all posts will be tagged #ocb2b In my last post, "The Strategy Team & Goal Definition" I discussed the importance of identifying internal stakeholders for a community, getting the stakeholders engaged, and the process of defining initial goals for the online community strategy. In this post, I will discuss the crucial role of member research in creating a successful community strategy. In the most basic form, a community strategy is a balance of an organization's goals and member (a.k.a customer) needs. Note: I will be using the terms "member" and "customer" interchangeably in this post. I will also use the term "member" as a placeholder for current and potential members of a community.

Why Conduct Member Research? Conducting member needs research as part of the strategy development process brings the voice of customer to the center of the strategy, and helps create a lens through which to focus your community building activities. Specifically, member research can help answer questions like:

• What are member's expectations of you / your organization as a community host?
  
• What role should you play as host, and what community activities should you facilitate?
  
• What types of content and features should be present in the community?
  
• Should the community be an "on domain" destination, or should the community presence extend on to other sites, like Facebook?
  
• What types of members does the community want to include?
  
• What type of culture does the community need to thrive?
  
• What activities are members prepared to participate in that will directly or indirectly benefit the host?
  
• What types of marketing and advertising would members find acceptable?
  

Techniques for Conducting Member Research: The process for conducting member research is straightforward: decide on the appropriate techniques given your budget, recruit subjects, conduct the research and analyze the results. Great places to recruit research subjects:

• Your existing community
  
• Your blog
  
• Your corporate web site
  
• Partners
  
• Newsletter mailing lists
  
• Customer Conferences
  
• Independent communities about your product or in your market or topic area
  
• Facebook or Linkedin groups about your product or in your market or topic area
  

One on One Interviews
One on one interviews can be conducted either in-person or over the phone. The key ingredients are a customer, an interviewer, a notetaker and a simple interview script (a sample can be found below). Interviews can be as short as 30 minutes, and generally should last no more than an hour (in our experience). In my experience, a minimum of 5-6 interviews will yield useful themes and give good data for strategy direction. If your community will serve many different products, market segments or customer types, a good rule of thumb is to try and do interviews with at least 3 people from each segment, if possible. One on One interviews can also be augmented nicely by a follow up online survey to a larger group, in order to drill down further on issues uncovered in the initial round of interviews.

Group Sessions
Another great way to get feedback, and to get a lot of feedback at once is to conduct a group feedback session. This is similar to the one on one interviews, except you are guiding a group of members through the script, as opposed to just one. Involving multiple subjects at once increases the complexity of the process, so be sure to have someone skilled at facilitation leading the session to keep the conversation on track (per the script), as well as to ensure that all participants have equal air time to give their opinions and feedback.

Online Surveys
The fastest, and often lowest overhead way to get member feedback is to create a short online survey to send to research participants. Online surveys are really great at getting quick quantitative feedback, and the results (depending on the tool) are fairly easily to analyze and study. A few issues with online surveys are that the quality of the results depends on the quality of the questions, and in particular, thinking through appropriate choices for multiple choice questions, and also creating effect write in questions that will yield helpful qualitative feedback.

In most cases for the community and social media strategy work I do at Forum One, I will generally conduct a set of 7-10 One on One interviews with community members, and follow up with an online survey to at least 100 community members.

Questions to Ask During Research There are essentially 3 overarching questions you want to answer as an output of member reearch:

1. What do community members need from you as the host? Ask questions that explore member expectations of your organization in the role of host. What are the member expectations around your level of participation, your effort in developing content, in fostering participation and your commitment to hosting the community long-term?

2. What do community members need from each other? Explore what community members might desire from interactions with other community members. This could range from knowledge sharing, to providing mentoring, to ongoing professional or personal support.

3. What can community members contribute? It is important to understand what ways community members are capable of, prepared and willing to participate. Participation could include sharing domain expertise, offering content samples, answering suport questions, or even just participating in casual online conversation. In order to answer the key questions, you will need to ask a series of baseline demographics questions (for context), as well as exploring each of the three key questions in a more granular way. A sampling of questions that can be used to create a script or facilitation guide are included below. Sample List of Interview / Survey Questions:

• Name, organization, title, a brief role description
  
• What information sources do you rely on (relating to the topic of the community)?
  
• What groups (on/offline) are you a member of (relating to the topic of the community)?
  
• What products / services do you use (relating to the topic of the community)?
  
• What is the biggest challenge you face in your day to day work (assuming this relates to the topic of the community)?
  
• How satisfied are you with the level and type of communication you have with organization x?
  
• Do you currently participate in any of the following social media activities: blogging, discussion forums, facebook, twitter, youtube etc (shape the list based on your audience)
  
• What information, insight or content do you want to share with other customers?
  
• What kinds of information would be helpful for other customers to share with you?
  
• If organization x were to offer the following content or features, please rate how useful each would be to you: discussion forums, expert Q&A, tutorials & tips, video previews, customer blogs, etc.
  
• Would you be interested in connecting with other members at local, in-person events?
  

A Note About Being "Member Shy" I continue to be surprised at the lack of member research in many community strategy projects. Even for organizations that are highlighted as examples of "getting it", there are still cases where the community wasn't engaged in research about a major platform change, feature enhancement or policy shift (facebook privacy anyone?). In many cases there seems to be a real fear (or at least discomfort) in connecting 1 to 1 with customers. Fear could be rooted in the ability to have meaningful interaction at scale, the overhead associated with regular contact, or the lack of an evolved organizational culture that encourages this type of interaction. Any community strategy development (or refinement) initiative requires the input and direction of the members. I've seen investment in member research pay off consistently, just as I've seen the severe cost of not conducting member research hamper or sink many community projects. In short: Want to know what your members want from their online community? Just ask.

This post is part of an ongoing series about developing an online community strategy. As a reminder, all posts will be tagged #ocb2b

Define Business Goals and Objectives
As I mentioned in my previous post, the recommended first step in developing (or refining) your organization's online community strategy is to answer the question: What are you, as an organization, trying to accomplish? I acknowledge that this is a simple, but loaded, question. Answering the question of Organization intention is 1/2 of the equation for a successful community strategy. The other half of the equation is understanding community member's needs and predisposition, which I cover in the next post in the strategy series.

Generally, an executive taps a strategy lead to help develop online community initiatives at an organization. In some cases, the strategy lead actually rises out of the ranks to propose direction to the executives. In both cases, there are two essential roles:

• Sponsoring Executive: The C-level or SVP that is the champion of community & social media in the C-suite. This is often the CMO, the VP of Marketing, or VP of Support.
  
• Strategy Lead: The person charged with directing strategy development from kickoff through launch or annual engagement planning.

Said another way: The Sponsoring Exec has the financial and political capital to fund the community initiative, and the Strategy Lead executes research and planning necessary to create the community strategy.

Next, the Strategy Lead forms a core team to facilitate discussion with the extended stakeholders around the following topics:

• the intention in engaging the community;
  
• the potential value the organization hopes to create for itself and its customers;
  
• the risk associated with engaging, including worst case scenarios;
  
• the overhead, including headcount, budgets and staff time;
  
• the level of readiness to participate, and the required culture change to be successful

Identifying and Engaging Internal Stakeholders
The current definition of stakeholder on wikipedia describes the role of stakeholder as "... a party that affects or can be affected by the actions of the business as a whole." Given the inclusive nature of many social media and community efforts, an argument could be made that everyone in the company is a stakeholder in the strategy, and in a sense, that is true. In order to actually get work done, you need to trim the list a bit, down to relevant and representative stakeholders that represent key roles and departments affected by, or expected to contribute resources to the community.

A list of likely internal stakeholders includes:

• Marketing: Representatives from brand, field and demand generation;
  
• Web Team: User experience, analytics, content and technical / development resources;
  
• Product: Product management, product marketing;
  
• Support: The manager of any existing support forums, knowledgeable, as potentially a representative from technical writing;
  
• HR: HR representatives to help develop participating policies and guidelines;
  
• Legal: to develop policies and guidelines, as well as terms of use;

Process: Kickoff, Work Sessions, Interviews and Synthesis
So, how does all of this actually come together? I've used the following process on the job at my former employer Autodesk, as well as in our services practice here at Forum One. The process starts with a kickoff meeting, continues with individual interviews with key stakeholders, includes follow up working sessions with a core team, and concludes with analysis and synthesis of all of the inputs by the Strategy Lead.

Kickoff: A meeting is convened by the Strategy Lead, and usually includes the Executive sponsor as well as key internal stakeholders. The group is generally no more than 5-7 people. The kickoff usually lasts 2-3 hours, and covers:

• Project scope, participant roles, and communication protocols;
  
• Review of the current state of online community and social media activities (if any);
  
• Discussion of potential goals for the community strategy, related to organization's mission and annual goals;
  
• Potential sources of value from online community engagement, including qualitative and quantitative measurements;
  
• Recent customer research and/or feedback;
  
• Existing customer community touchpoints & activities (blogs, facebooks groups, etc)
  
• Possible Inluencers / Lead users in the community ecosystem (bloggers, Twitter pundits, etc)
  
• Discussion of additional stakeholders to involve;
  
• Discussion of potential risks;

Stakeholder Interviews:
After the kickoff, interviews with key stakeholders are held to take a deeper dive in to the questions explored in the kickoff meeting, and also to give the stakeholder "airtime" to state requirements, explore ideas and express concerns. The interviews can be done face to face or over the phone, generally last between 30-45 minutes, and are conducted by an interviewer, with backup by a note-taker. Depending on the size of the extended stakeholder pool and the complexity of the project, I generally try to do at least 8 stakeholder interviews. As an augmentation to the in person interviews, I've also done an online survey for stakeholders that is based on the interview script. This is a good way to reach a wider audience and get a large set of quantitative and qualitative data.

Work Sessions:
In addition to the kickoff, there are generally 1-3 work sessions to review and refine key points from the discussion in the kickoff meeting. These additional working sessions are a great place for brainstorming potential community features and engagements, and to discuss examples of online community and social media from competitors, leaders in the industry, or shiny object examples outside of your industry. The outputs of the work sessions are analyzed in the Synthesis phase.

Synthesis:
The outputs of the kickoff, working sessions and stakeholder interviews are analyzed by the Strategy Lead, and summarized in to a working strategy brief (typically a word doc). The key elements of the brief generally include:

• A statement of purpose or intention for the online community strategy;
  
• Business goals for the online community initiative, ideally showing support of organizational mission and goals, and with initial metrics of success;
  
• Key findings from the stakeholder interviews (which will have informed, and ideally support, the two points above)

Next Up: Member Needs Analysis
As I mentioned at the beginning of the post, the Organization's goals are half of the equation for a successful community strategy. The other half is obviously assessing the needs and predisposition of the community. In the next post in the series, I will talk about how to find and solicit feedback from potential (or current) community members, and what to do with that information.

The topic of online community strategy is one of the things that occupies a large chunk of my mental cycles. I've written about a pretty basic process and framework a few times over the years, and I think the baseline concepts have held up well. You can read a couple of relatively recent posts here (I'd love to hear your thoughts):
How to Develop a Community Strategy
Holistic Community Strategy

Why am I Doing This?
I'm very passionate about the opportunities that online communities and social media bring to the table, and I've had my fair share of real world experience (10+ years), but the primary reason I want to write this series is pretty simple:
Organizations are still challenged with setting strategy. From our efforts with the Online Community Research Network, we still see that only about 25% of our participant organizations have a comprehensive community strategy in place.

Over the next few weeks, I will explore the following topics, offering my own opinions and insight, data from our ongoing community research, as well as other relevant content from experienced community-building professionals. I'll also try to post as many templates that I use (or can borrow), where appropriate. In short: I'll be posting, you will be adding to the discussion, and we will all (hopefully) be making our day to day community practices a little better. I hope that sounds like fun

The Topics
The topics, which generally follow my strategy development process, will be:

1. Goal Definition:
How to assemble an internal stakeholder team and facilitate definition of business goals for the community.

2. Member Needs Research:
Processes and techniques for engaging community members in a process of discovery and conducting member "needs" research.

3. Social Media Ecosystem Research:
Methodology for conducting a discovery exercise of the relevant parts of the social web to find out where your community (or potential community) is already working and playing.

4. Designing an Online Presence Architecture (with a hat tip to Chris Brogan):
Factoring the goals of the business, the needs of the members, and the opportunities in the social media ecosystem to create a presence architecture that maps out where to focus engagements.

5. Engagement Planning:
How to develop content & activity plans for the community, including
–Where: to engage (home, outposts)
–Who: responsible party
–How: specific activity
–When: frequency of activity
–What: expected outcomes (prototypical metrics!)

6. Community Platform Selection:
Guidance on how to select a community platform, along with recent ratings for major platforms.

7. Management & Moderation
An overview of the important and evolving role of the Online Community Manager, building an online community team, and best practices on moderation.

8. Metrics & Reporting
What metrics to collect, what they tell you, who to report them to, and how often.

9. Policy Creation & Roll-out
How to develop community and social media policies that fit your organization, and how to deploy them.

10. Governance
Creating a governance structure in your organization, keeping exective stakeholders informed and engaged, and achieving the right balance of of inter-departmental communication and guidance.

11. Superusers / Elites
A review of the best superusers programs, with a focus on process, identification and incentives.

Again, I would LOVE your feedback on the topics above. My goals is to write an article a week over the next 12-14 weeks. Each article will be labeled "Back to Basics", and will be tagged #ocb2b

We announced our partnership with ReadWriteWeb in August of this year. One of the best resources we've seen from ReadWriteWeb this year is their Guide to Online Community Management, which is a great primer to the ins and outs of managing an online community. Editor Marshall Kirkpatrick and his team have sifted through massive amounts of information to cull out the most salient points and relevant sources for thinking about engaging in online community-building activities and getting started with online community management.

The Report Covers:

The Basics
The definition of an online community manager, assessing the need for community features on your site, and reasons for participating in the social media ecosystem (like Twitter & Facebook).

Do Startups Need Community Managers?
The blog post and comments that triggered the report: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/hiring_a_community_manager.php

ROI
Perspectives from the field, including Jeremiah Owyang and Joe Cothrel.

Job Description
A thorough exploration of the role of Community Manager, and key differences between the community role and more "traditional" roles like marketing and customer support.

The Marketing / Engagement Balance
A discussion of the convergence of activities for the Community Manger role.

Dealing with Challenging Community Members
How to deal with "problem" community members and how to redirect the negative energy.

Interviews with Community Managers
Including Dawn Foster and Lucia Willow

The report also lists a number of key online and in-person resources (including Forum One's Online Community Unconferences).

Online companion
One of the most innovative things about the report is the companion content site that curates the content streams from the contributors to the report in a one place.

If you are interested in purchasing the report, you may do so here.

In addition to studying compensation during our second annual Online Community & Social Media Compensation study (summary here), we also want to dig in to issues related the organizational environment that community and social media professionals work in. One key dimension is overall job satisfaction.

As part of the research, we asked the question: Please rate your overall job satisfaction?
Of the 370 respondents, most are "somewhat satisfied" with their jobs with an average satisfaction score of 4.1 and a median score of 4. The average satisfaction score was slightly less than last year’s score of 4.2. It is encouraging that while there is an economic downturn, the overall satisfaction with Online Community positions is well above average. This indicates the combination of salary, benefits, work environment and subject matter is working for most of the respondents. The economy can't be ignored as a major factor of influence on satisfaction scores, as a tough economic environment generally discourages folks from aggressively exploring new opportunities and tending to stay with existing positions.

The graphs below show data from the satisfaction questioned presented in a couple of ways: answers form our 2008 survey compared with 2009, and overall satisfaction compared between genders.

2008 Satisfaction vs. 2009



Satisfaction by Gender


As you can see from the graphs, average overall satisfaction was down slightly from 2008 to 2009. You can also see that women were less satisfied than their male counterparts.

A few write in answers from the report that add color to the graphs:

Unfortunately I feel that most companies are still unable to fully grasp the importance of a dedicated social media team. They do not see a direct correlation between social media and ROI, and therefore are hesitant to put as many resources (both people and money) into social media as is typically necessary. Granted, I was on the periphery of social media for the last three years while I was in graduate school; however since my graduation and re-immersion into social media, I haven't noticed much of a change. Most social media job postings are for intern positions.

I think, even still, a lot of organizations (executives and HR) don't understand what we do, and therefore tend to undervalue it. I was laid off from my previous job last year and although I found another job fairly quickly, compensation was a struggle. I ended up settling for less compensation than I wanted in order to get back in a job quickly.

Engagement with the online community and interacting with others in the field is the most rewarding part of my job.

Because community management is often rooted in customer support organizations, compensation tends to be determined relative to CSRs. In fact, more and more community managers play a critical role in shaping customer experience and ultimately brand, and their compensation needs to reflect that value in a way more commensurate with significant marketing roles.

Perhaps the only one other comment I would suggest is that the corporate world needs to understand that community building is a full time job and as such we need official job descriptions put together by HR that are aligned with the business needs as well as the personal career development opportunities from knowledge workers. Something we haven't even started to think about just yet!

Unless Online Community and Social Media is considered a valuable part of an organization and an intrical part of the overall customer touch processes, it won't get the resources and funds to grow. The value given directly correlates into the # of bodies dedicated to support it and the salaries that are paid.

On the one hand, community and social media professionals still seem very enthused about their jobs, and the emerging "social" industry. On the other hand, issues related to lack of standards on community and social roles, team structure, funding as well as difficulty showing financial ROI (in some cases) are clearly starting to cause fatigue.

What do you think? How satisfied are you in your community or social media role?

Last year, Forum One recognized that one of the key issues community and social media professionals face is that we (as an industry) are suffering from a lack of solid benchmarks, including compensation of online community and social media professionals. In July of 2008, as part of our ongoing research efforts with the Online Community Research Network, we conducted the first comprehensive study and gained valuable insight about online community and social media professional's compensation, team structure, and current job satisfaction.

In July of 2009, we launched the second annual Online Community & Social Media Compensation study, and received approximately 370 qualified responses. Participants represent a comprehensive sampling of organizations involved in building online communities, including: large software companies, large community destination sites, niche community sites, platform providers, media & entertainment, retail and independent consultants. A sample of the 300+ organizations that participated include (with their permission):
Answers Corp., Autodesk, Avid, Best Buy, Cartoon Network (Turner), Consumer Reports, Electronic Arts, hi5, IBM, KaBOOM!, Nokia, Quest Software, Sage Software, Seesmic, Sony Online Entertainment, The Knot, and Yahoo!

This year's report was truly global in scope, and included respondents from the USA, UK and Canada as well as Australia, Argentina, Spain, China, Costa Rica, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Sweden, Turkey and Ukraine.

Several key issues pertaining to online community and social media salaries surfaced during this report, including:
• The gap between the average male and female salaries widened, with male respondents averaging $86,644 (up from $85,423 in ’08) and Females averaging $75,624 (down from $77,319 in ’08).
• The majority of respondents reported a salary increase in 2009, but the percentage compared to last year was down, as was a significant increase in the number of respondents who took a salary decrease in 2009 compared to 2008.
• Average overall job satisfaction was down by a fraction, from 4.2 (out of 5) in 2008 to 4.1 (out of 5) in 2009.
• Several respondents mentioned feeling like they were being inadequately compensated because of lack of data available regarding community and social media salaries, as well as lack of understanding of community and social media ROI relative to their organization’s activities.

Demographics
Key demographic and background information about the respondents:
• The majority of the respondents are Female (52%) vs. Male (48%).
• The majority (77%) of respondents are from the USA.
• Most of the respondents have more than 5 years of experience, completed a Bachelors Degree, and work 41-50 hours per week.
• The majority of respondents work for a Profit Based Organization (85%) vs. Non-Profit (15%).

Industry



Years of Expereince




Work Environment

Location of Community Team
The majority of responses indicate their Community teams reside in the Marketing and Community departments. “No formal structure” and “Throughout the company” were also popular responses. The placement of the community team seems to be shifting to Marketing and Community departments. Last year 20% reported residing in the Marketing department and only 19% reported that they had their own Community department.



Hours Worked Per Week
Most of the respondents (45%) work 41-50 hours per week.



Percentage of Time Dedicated to Community & Social Media
Approximately three quarters of the respondents (73%) said that their job duties were not only comprised of working within the online community, and that a percentage of their time is dedicated to other areas within their organization.




Compensation
The average salary of the research participants, $81k, is the same as last year. The mean was $77.5k, which is $10k higher last year. As in 2008, there were peaks on both the low ($0-$25k) and high ends (more than $150k). There were also peaks and dips throughout the salary spectrum for 2009, including peaks for the following salary ranges; $50-55k, $65-$70k, $90-$95k and $100-$105k.

Salary by Gender
On average, the female participants earned an annual salary of $75.5k, which was slightly lower than last year’s $77k. At $86.5K, the male participant’s average annual salary is one percent higher than last year. The overall average annual salary for all participants was the same as last year’s $81k.



Salary by Region: USA
Respondents in the southwest region of the USA reported the highest average / median salary. The average salary for the southwest region was $99k with a median of $102k, which is significantly higher than last year’s average salary of $85k.

The second highest average / median salaries in the USA are in the northwest region. These respondents have an average salary of $87k, which is slightly less than the average annual salary of 2008. Within the northwest region, California had a higher average annual salary ($92k) than reported last year ($89k).

Even though lowest average / median salary in the USA was the same this year as last, the southeast region did have the largest reported average annual decrease compared with last year. This year the southeast region had an average annual salary of $46k, whereas last year it was 72k.

There were general peaks on the high ends (more than 150k) and low ends ($0-$25k) for all regions, except for the Midwest region, which dipped at the low end and remained even at the high end.




Satisfaction
The average satisfaction score was slightly less than last year’s score of 4.2. It is encouraging that while there is an economic downturn, the overall satisfaction with Online Community positions is well above average. This indicates the combination of salary, benefits, work environment and subject matter is working for most of the respondents. Although female and male participants mostly rated as being satisfied or somewhat satisfied with their jobs, the female participants are slightly more satisfied with their jobs than their male counterparts. The women had a higher percentage of rating in the somewhat satisfied category, whereas the men had a higher percentage rating for the somewhat dissatisfied category.




The Full Online Community & Social Media Compensation Report
The full 45 page report can be purchased here: http://store.onlinecommunityresearch.com/oncosomecosu.html
includes detailed information, analysis and charts on:
Participating organizations industry, size and history of community programs
Community Team Staff & Size
Education and experience of respondents
Compensation structures
Detailed benefits
Salaries
- Ranges
- Average by title
- Average by Gender, Age, Eduction
- Average by global location and USA Region
Salary Changes (Increase and Decrease)
Advice from many of the participants about factors that affect compensation, and the evolving roles and responsibilities of the online community team, the team's staff, and executives.

The tag for the Online Community & Social Media Compensation report is #occomp09.

The Online Community Platform and Services Satisfaction research report was published in March of this year as part of the ongoing efforts of the Online Community Research Network. The intention of the research project was to provide insight about customer attitudes towards online community platform and service vendors, particularly around satisfaction. Further, we wanted to explore the unmet needs in the online community platform and services market. The study had over 200 participants, and we gathered data on all major commercial and open source online community platforms, as well as feedback on custom built platforms. Key highlights from the research are covered in the slides below.

The full Online Communities: Platform and Services Satisfaction Report can be purchased here:
http://store.onlinecommunityresearch.com/oncoplandses.html

Forum One hosted the eighth annual Online Community Summit 2009 last week in Sonoma, and by all accounts (and feedback) it was one of the strongest. We convened 70 online community experts to discuss important and timely topics including: community strategy, employees as social media advocates, "ideas" platforms, the growing importance of mobile and "operationalizing" social media.

I've included links to a few key content sources below. You will find a rich set of observations in the Twitter stream, as well as video interviews from 3 of our session leads.

Tweet stream from the Online Community Summit 2009
http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23ocs2009

Flickr stream:
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=ocs2009&w=all

Video Interviews:
Sharon Carothers of Legacy / BecomeAnEx.org


Jordan Williams of REI.com


Erica Kuhl of Salesforce.com

A recent series of articles from ReadWriteWeb has spawned discussion here at Forum One of what impact the "real-time web" will have on online communities. Those conversations continue, but I wanted to share our short list of selected readings on the topic from the last 12 months.

Ken Fromm wrote the series of articles about the real-time web, and they can be found here:
The Real-Time Web: A Primer, Part 1,
The Real-Time Web: A Primer, Part 2,
The Real-Time Web: A Primer, Part 3

In the articles, he describes the collection of activities that describe the emerging Real-Time Web:

As with other recent waves of innovation (Web 2.0 and cloud computing, for example) there is no single definition of what the term "real-time Web" means. As a result, it is used as a catch-all phrase for a number of developments underway. At this point, we can identify that the real-time Web...:
1. is a new form of communication,
2. creates a new body of content,
3. is real time,
4. is public and has an explicit social graph associated with it,
5. carries an implicit model of federation.

Other recommended reading:

Google vs. The Real-Time Web
O'Reilly: The Real-Time Web

Real-Time Web Summit
Forum One is working with ReadWriteWeb to promote the Real-Time Web Summit in Mountain View on October 15th. I'll be there - will you? You can register here. Price is $195 until October 8th.

Updated 9/22/09.
The Online Communities: Metrics and Reporting research study was initiated in late July of 2009, and ran until the second week of August 2009. The research project was conducted by the Online Community Research Network, and the intention of the study was to get a broad look at what online community metrics organizations are tracking, how organizations determine and report on the ongoing value of their online community initiatives, and the reporting and metrics tools that help companies assess this.

We received approximately 175 responses. Participants represent a healthy swath of the types of organizations participating in online community culture. Participating industry categories include: software companies, hardware companies, consumer goods non-profit organizations, independent consultants and media companies, amongst others.

Report Highlights
Several key issues pertaining to online community and social media metrics surfaced during this report, including:

• In general, organizations need to do a more thorough job of defining their business objectives for online community engagement, assessing ways to measure progress towards these objectives, reaching beyond their native platform metrics capabilities, and finding ways to measure the more qualitative components of community member engagement.
• The Role of the Community Manager is increasingly important to developing and refining business process, and measuring performance in these new “social spaces.”
• There is a growing need for community metric standards that are platform and vendor-independent.

Determining What to Measure
From Question 14: How does your organization determine what is important to measure and report?

SUMMARY:

• 20% (34) We stick with what the platform can provide
• 61% (100) We work from a strategy based on business goals and find solution to help us measure what we need
• 19% (31) We try to measure everything, will develop more of a strategy later

TAKEAWAY:
Respondents are primarily shaping metrics strategies based on business goals (61%), even if their platform doesn’t support gathering or tracking desired metrics. Platform metrics are generally speaking, not comprehensive or extensible enough to create a meaningful dashboard to see overall community health, get an accurate visualization of the community’s social graph, and to understand the ongoing insight created by and the sentiments of the community population. The risk in relying only on data that a platform can provide (20% of the respondents) is that the data sets aren’t comprehensive or contextual to organization’s needs. “Measuring everything” (19% of respondents) can overwhelm the community team and stakeholders, and is unlikely to yield meaningful performance data or insight without some rigor in the analysis.
















Metrics Currently Being Tracked
From Question 16: What do you currently measure?

SUMMARY:
The top 5 items that online communities measure for tracking and reporting are as follows:

• 152 Responses - Unique Visitors
• 150 Responses - New Member Registrations
• 143 Responses - Page Views
• 126 Responses - Visitors
• 116 Responses - Message Posts


The top 5 items that online communities don’t measure, but want to are as follows:

• 90 Responses - Member Satisfaction
• 90 Responses - Influencer / Evangelism
• 84 Responses - Member Life Cycle
• 83 Responses - Member Loyalty
• 73 Responses - Referrals to Community


TAKEAWAY:
The top 5 items that online communities currently measure for tracking and reporting are the same for both profit and non-profit organizations and include Unique Visitors, New Member Registrations, Page Views, Visitors and Message Posts.

Non-profit organizations concentrate on measuring Podcasts & Video Links and Member Satisfaction, more often than other organizations, whereas commercial organizations place more attention on measuring Retention / Attrition, Member Loyalty, Member Blog Posts and Conversion than non-profit organizations.

As organization’s community strategies mature, the trend to primarily report on basic web metrics (page views, registrations) will be replaced by metrics that speak to the health of the community, the strength of members’ networks, the quality and type of member participation, and more robust measurements of member engagement. The data suggest that we are on the cusp of the evolution from “basic” community metrics to more robust and contextual reporting.

Currently Measuring - Profit and Non Profit


A larger version of the graph can be downloaded here:
http://www.onlinecommunityreport.com/images/metrics_tracked_2009_graph.png



Top 3 Key Performance Indicators

From Question 19: What are the 3 most important community key performance indicators in the reports you send to management?

SUMMARY:

• 32% (74) User Activity / Engagement
• 21% (49) Membership Count [New Registrations, Active]
• 18% (42) Number of Posts / Comments
• 5% (12) Member Satisfaction / Loyalty
• 4% (10) Number of Questions Answered
• 4% (10) Sales Revenue - Up Sell, Cross Sell, Renewals
• 4% (8) Leeds / Referrals Generated
• 3% (6) Number of Downloads
• 3% (6) Number of Influencers / Evangelists
• 2% (5) Visitor Retention
• 2% (5) Number of Conversions
• 1% (2) Donations Received
  
• 1% (2) Visitor Geographic Dispersal


TAKEAWAY:
Almost a third of respondents indicated that User Activity / Engagement (32%) is one of the most important key performance indicators in the reports that they sent to management. Within the User Activity / Engagement category, the following 3 key performance indicators were the most commonly reported:


• 33 Number of Page Views / Clicks
• 22 Number of Site Visits
• 19 Number of Unique Visits


The other two key performance indicators that many respondents input into management reports are Membership Count (21%) (including new membership and total membership count) and the Number of Posts / Comments (18%) received on their site.

User Activity / Engagement is the number one item to track for both profit and non-profit organizations. Within this category the specific key performance indicators were dispersed similarly, with the profit based organizations having a slightly higher percentage ratio on key performances such as the Number of Threads reported and General Participation. Non-profit organizations, on the other hand, have a slightly higher percentage ratio on reporting metrics such as Number of Returning Visitors and the Number of Site Visits.

Another common response from profit based organizations was related to reporting key performances such as Sales Revenue and the Number of Conversions whereas non-profit organizations had a higher percentage response rate for reporting the amount of Donations Received.















USER ACTIVITY / ENGAGEMENT 34% (BROKEN OUT):

















Access to the Full Report
For members of the Online Community Research Network, the report is included as a benefit of your annual subscription. If you are interested in joining the OCRN, or learning more about the Network's activities, please go here.

The Online Communities: Metrics and Reporting 2009 report is also available for purchase for $295.