Most organizations do not have a comprehensive community strategy in place. In most cases, community strategy is actually a set of tactics that individual departments are engaging in based on product or market segments. While this grass roots approach is where many organizations have to start, it is not a sustainable approach. The primary issue is one of valuing the activities, content and relationships of the community in the context of the host organization. Said another way, most organizations have no idea how to evaluate the cost of online community and social media activities, or how to asses the value of these activities because they haven't been internalized in to the organization's cultural, financial and operational value systems.

I've started to refer to a more comprehensive approach to community development as "Holistic Community Strategy". This concept builds on the techniques I outlined in the post "How to Develop a Community Strategy"

In the Holistic Community Strategy framework, I see the following as the three most important contexts:

1. Host Organization (a.k.a. "The Business")
In order to understand value, the host organization has to have a series of internal conversations at a senior level and across most (if not all departments) about:
• its intention in engaging the community;
• the potential value the organization hopes to create for itself and its customers;
• the risk associated with engaging;
• the overhead, including headcount, budgets and staff time;
• the level of readyness to participate, and the required culture change to be successful

2. Customers (a.k.a. "The Members")
Customers (potential / current members) should be engaged in the development of community features, programs and policy. I cover techniques to do this in the post "How to Develop a Community Strategy".

3. Community Ecosystem
As I mentioned before, most community strategies tend to focus on the hosted properties of the organization. The reality is that there is an ever expanding universe of online touchpoints that an organization's community members are participating in. An "Ecosystem audit" should be conducting as part of a strategy development (or strategy course correction) exercise in order to discover where the centers or activity are, and who the most vocal and active participants are.

I gave the following presentation at the Community 2.0 conference this week, that provides an initial sketch of the framework. I'd love to hear your thoughts and questions.

Many organizations are involved with online community building activities, but few consider implications of their online communities on making their business more "green", or even better, more sustainable.

The case can be made that online community building activities support the three key areas of Sustainable Development:

From the Wikipedia definition of Sustainable Development:

Sustainable development is a pattern of resource use that aims to meet human needs while preserving the environment so that these needs can be met not only in the present, but in the indefinite future.

... The field of sustainable development can be conceptually broken into three constituent parts: environmental sustainability, economic sustainability and sociopolitical sustainability.

While I don't propose that online communities can magically transform organizations into sustainability superstars, but I do think there is a case to be made that online communities can help support a more sustainable enterprise for many companies. Let's take a look at each constituent category that makes up sustainable development:

1. Environmental

As my colleague Jim Cashel pointed out in a post last year,

Online communities are green.

I believe that online community professionals should hook onto the "green" juggernaut, especially in three ways:

- Anyone involved with corporate green strategy should include an online community strategy;
- Anyone developing online community metrics should include carbon savings as an indicator;
- Anyone marketing online communities should speak to their "green" qualities.

I asked for examples (via Twitter) of communities focused on green and sustainable development issues, and John Kembel, CEO of HiveLive was kind enough to forward a couple of his favorite examples of Green / Sustainability communities:

See The Designers Accord -- just written up in FastCompany
(http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/129/100000-and-counting.html).
They just launched a community to start the conversation and to
promote sustainable design within the design community worldwide
(e.g., IDEO and others). Their website: http://designersaccord.org
and their brand new community: http://community.designersaccord.org

Another example:

Ryan Martens (CTO of Rally -- rallydev.com) is a strong proponent of
greening the software industry through Agile + Community. See
http://agilecommons.org/hives/6997a8ec6a/summary
E.g., using community to directly engage customers and involve them in
the software dev process rids companies of the 60% wasted development
in most apps (mostly because the conversation between product manager
and customer isn't tight enough). And they're doing lots of things as
a company in addition to promoting agile and using community.

2. Economic
There are a few obvious (and myriad not so obvious) economic benefits to firms engaging in community building activities, from the proven cost-reduction of support forums to the idea generation of innovation communities like My Starbuck Idea and Dell's Ideastorm. Online communities can be sources of tremendous value, and the value-creation happens in much more sustainable way (low environmental impact, source of value is easily replenished) than other processes like manufacturing of consumer goods.

3. Sociopolitical / Social Capital Development
The sociopolitical implications of online communities have inspired many an academic journal article, and the possible benefits range from a more transparent and representative government to supporting human rights worldwide. Online communities (and more generally, social media) allow for identity, sharing and connection at scales we haven't previously seen. As the world becomes smaller by being more connected, the connected individual (arguably) becomes more empowered. Specific examples of the sociopolitical implications of online communities range from social capital created and exchanged via Facebook, the mix of social and real capital that support the developing world on Kiva.org, or the potential for change that many hope for with the beginings of Change.gov .

It's Time to Consider Sustainability
The concept of thinking about online communities and social media through the lens of sustainable development is a nascent one, but given what is at stake, it's one who's time has come.

Quoting again from Jim's "Online Communities Are Green" post

We've always tried to cast our arguments for online communities in black and white. It's time to use a bit more green.

I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts, feedback and examples.

If you are interested in discussing this topic in person, as well as other issues related to sustainability and environmental concerns in the enterprise, please consider joining us for the Green Enterprise Unconference on December 3rd in Mountain View, CA.

Unfortunately, there has been a lot of very grim economic news of late. The purpose of this post isn't to give an overview of the current economic situation, but rather to highlight possible implications of a slower economy on business, and by extension, on online community budgets. More importantly, I want to start a discussion about Community Managers can help their community's survive and thrive during the downturn.

We have seen this cycle before, and relatively recently. When the web 1.0 bubble burst, many "community"-based startups ceased to exist, and spending on online community development in the enterprise all but dried up. From personal experience, most of the community initiatives at Autodesk were suspended in the closing months of 2001, and we shifted focus to our discussion groups and some customer-generated content activities.

What was different with Community 2.0?
By late 2004 and early 2005, key changes in in the marketplace, in organizations attitudes and in customer (user / people online / etc) behavior led to an explosive growth of social media, use of social networking and increased online community building activities by many organizations.

Key factors were (IMHO, I won't list all):
• Cost of platforms dramatically decreased, and in some cases fell to zero
• Consumer and workplace broadband reached ~100% penetration
• Consumers accepted less formal content, trust in "people like me" exceeded authoritities
• A certain segment of the group formerly known as "the audience" decided they wanted to actively create, participate and connect
• Many companies started to accept and practice the principals outlined in the Cluetrain Manifesto, and in the many key books, blogs and conference that followed, evangelizing the metaphor of conversation

Things Were Going So Well, What Happened?
Earlier this year, we started to hear significant rumblings from wall street that things were not ok, particularly with the credit markets. Over the last two weeks, the markets have been in turmoil. Many organizations are seeing the dark shadow of a recession. Some argue we are already there. One thing is clear: most organizations have shifted to a more conservative outlook for 2009.

As organizations take a more sober look at the last quarter of 2008 and make projections for 2009, there are some likely implications for online community programs:
• Budgets will likely shrink
• Headcount will likely be frozen
• Positions may be consolidated (merging of roles)
• Layoffs may happen
• It will be harder to upgrade / make improvements to infrastructure
• Pressure will increase quickly and dramatically for some articulation of value
• Programs may be cut back
• In extreme cases, some community programs may be abandoned

Thriving in the Downturn
I want to be very clear here: I don't think the global economic circumstances mean gloom and despair for the entire online community sector. The circumstances for Community 2.0 that I outlined above still generally hold true, and I still believe most organizations can create real value by engaging in online community activity. Signs that interest in online community is still high are all around. For instance, demand for qualified community managers and strategists is at an all time high (even though we are starting to see the first hints of staff reduction).

However, I do think that Community Managers have some work to do in order to navigate some of the potential challenges I outlined above. I've outlined the following tactics that can help (and I'd love to here your suggestions via the comments).

• Focus on Defining / and Reporting Value
In order for your community strategy to be sustainable, you need to be able to articulate value back to the organization. This value has to be articulated, at least in part, in the cultural language of your organization. In some organizations, it's all about impact to customer loyalty, it some organizations, this value is growing an audience (member registrations). You will likely wind up with a report that is a mosaic of quantitative and qualitative sources. We've studied this issue in the Online Community Research Network, and you can see a report excerpt here:

Online Community ROI and Revenue Techniques

• Reach Out to Other Departments (CSR / Marketing / Support)
Online Communities offer value to almost every department in the organization, from HR (recruiting), to Support (call avoidance), to Marketing (awareness / reach), to the Product team (feedback, customer led innovation). Now is the time to reach out to other teams and create cross-organizations ties, and involve other teams in community building and engagement activities.

• Show the Cost of Not Participating
One way to show value back to management is to paint a picture of not having a community or community engagement strategy, and the associated costs and losses. These hypothetical costs can range from increased awareness of competitors to decreased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

• Be Honest About Your Strategy
Take a look at the community touchpoints and programs you are engaging in. Are there a few that have little or no participation? Are there features that score consistently low on your community research? Now is a good time to look at shedding these features and programs that are not creating value for your community. This is also an opportunity to involve the community in continuing to shape the experience and ongoing direction. Lastly, are there features or programs that you are struggling to maintain, that would be better served out in the community ecosystem? For instance, a particularly strong, independent Facebook group for your brand that you have been struggling with, or a user group that has a competitive feature on their site? Let it go.

• Stick Together
The worst feeling in trying times is feeling alone and isolated. If you and / or your team don't have peers at other companies to talk to and share strategies and tactics with, start making those connections now. There are lots of meetups (like my Online Community Roundtable), conferences and organizations (like the social media club and the online community research network) to help support you.


What do you think?
I would love to hear what you think, either via comments or email. Are you seeing changing attitudes towards your online community initiatives? Have you been affected by the downturn? Do you have advice or suggestions to help other navigate these issues?

The Online Community Compensation study was initiated in July of 2008 as part of our ongoing research efforts with the Online Community Research Network. Our intention of the study was to get a broad look at online community compensation, factors that effect compensation, and the current environment of the community team and community staff roles.

I posted key highlights from the report a few weeks ago.

Since then, we have been looking at other cuts of the data. One of the most interesting has been how salaries differ by region.

Key findings from the data
• The highest average / median annual salary in the USA comes from the research participants located in the northwest region. The average salary for the northwest region was $90k with a median of $90k.
• The lowest average / median annual salary in the USA comes from the research participants located in the southeast region. The average salary for the southeast region was $72k and the median was only $67k.
• There were general peaks on both the low ($0-$25k) and high ends (more than $150k) for all regions except the southwest regions.
• The northwest region peaked at the higher salary ranges than that of the other regions, peaking at both $65-75k and $85-105k
• The midwest region peaked at the lower salary ranges, peaking at both $45-55k and $65-85k.


As you can see below, our highest concentration of respondents was from the West, and in particular, CA.

Response Distribution by US Region:



Salary Averages and Medians by US Region



If you would like more information about the Online Communities Compensation report, feel free to contact me. The report can be purchased here.

One of the biggest challenges for those leading the community efforts for large organizations (or really, orgs of most sizes) is ensuring that the hosted community efforts of the organization are appropriate, valuable (both to the org and to the member / customer) and sustainable.

First, a little context. I worked at Autodesk for 6 years as the Online Experience Manager (basically a chief IA). The internal web team was structured as an agency within the company, and each division was a "client". This approach has pros and cons that I won't go in to now, but for the purposes of the conversation today, the effect was that we had oversight over most online activities, including any hosted community activity. One of the tools we used to ensure a quality online experience was to have our clients fill out a simple project brief describing their vision for the community.

Specifically, the brief covered:

• Client Team and Stakeholders


• A Summary of the initial community vision and purpose / rationale


• Executive sponsorship


• Community Manager and extended staff


• Desired features and content


• Goals "what does success look like?"


• Budget


• Launch date

I'm attaching a heavily modified version of the brief I used, updated with the benefit of a bit of hindsight.

I'd really love feedback on this, and would love to hear if you actually find it of use in your day to day practice.

You can download the brief template here:

oncomm_project_brief_v1

The LeFever's (Lee and Sachi) of commoncraft have done it again. Check out "Twitter in Plain English"



Do you tweet? Follow me on twitter, and I'll follow you back:
http://twitter.com/redplasticmonke

The Wall Street Journal published an article today on adverting and social media titled "Social Sites Don't Deliver Big Ad Gains".

The article offer a pretty good overview of the current state of online advertising with the backdrop of Microsoft's hostile takeover bid of Yahoo.

As Microsoft Corp. makes a $44.6 billion bet on Internet advertising with its unsolicited offer for Yahoo Inc., there are signs that some of the biggest new places where consumers are flocking on the Web -- social networking and video-sharing sites -- are yielding advertising revenue slower than some Internet companies had hoped.

Here is the thing: ADVERTISERS ARE STILL TRYING TO USE THE SAME WEB 1.0 ADS FOR THESE SITES. I doesn't surprise me at all that social networks are slow to take on advertising, and that those that do are finding "crude" tools like adwords more effective than simply shoving the same dated banner ads down community member's throats.

The secret sauce for success (I believe) lies in adhering to general good community building techniques.

- Know your member (consumer)
- Offer them something of value
- Craft the offer in a human voice
- Be transparent about your intentions
- Be respectful of the member (privacy, needs, wishes, intelligence)
- Accept feedback
- Have thick skin
- Continue to innovate (i.e. try, try again)

We have some early examples of attempts at innovation, including Facebook's beacon, but there are still miles to go in this race.

INTRODUCTION:
This post is targeted at folks just getting started with online community activities at their organization. It is written with the brand or product-specific corporate communities in mind, but is somewhat applicable to independent communities and non profit organizations.

A few key points to begin with:

First, the working assumption here is that most of you reading are engaged in some sort of initial community building activity, but do not have a comprehensive community strategy guiding your efforts.

Second, keep in mind one of the key decisions you will need to make is the mix of attention, energy and dollars you spend hosting a community, vs participating in external community sites like Facebook and MySpace.

Third, (particularly for marketers) engaging and building relationships with your community is a bit of a mind-shift from thinking "quarterly-driven campaigns". We have heard this as a recurring theme in our research and the conference we host on Marketing & Online communities. You won't have the same criteria for success with community building efforts as you do with a print campaign. You won't retain control of messaging. You have to be willing to invest the time to build relationships with members (yes, even one on one). This isn't a quick in and out.

So, how does one start to evaluate the opportunity with online communities? Research! The following 4 step framework describes my typical community strategy development exercise we use for our clients:


Step 1. Define Business Goals and Objectives
This first step establishes a baseline definition of the organization's goals and potential objectives for engaging in community building activities. These goals and objectives will serve as guidance throughout the project to ensure that the final strategy reflects a direction that creates value back to the organization. This process varies by organization type, the number and role of stakeholders, and the maturity (or existence) of the community team. The research in this step includes identification of the stakeholders for community within an organization, interviews with the stakeholders, and an initial brainstorm with members of the stakeholder's team to discuss objectives for community. Themes and business goals for a community strategy will emerge.

Step 2. Community Ecosystem Review
During this second phase the goal is to do an audit of the current community ecosystem, including customer, prospect, partner and competitor touch points. This information will help establish a baseline of market-oriented sites and activity, which will be important to understand the opportunities for new community activity by your (or your client's) brand.

Using tools like BlogPulse, Technorati, Delicious, and Google Blog search, conduct searches for brand mentions in the blogosphere and on smaller niche communities. You will quickly come up a list of the communities hosting conversations about your organization, products or brand, and the members (often time bloggers) engaging in those conversations.

It's also important to research activity on the "walled garden" communities, and larger social media sites that some times don't surface in search results. Sites like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Ning, Flickr, Satisfaction, etc. In particular, look for ad-hoc groups that have sprung up around your brand, or content tagged with your brand and/or products.

Step 3. Member Needs Analysis
This phase will establish a baseline for potential community member’s needs, as well as their expectations of your organization. This critical phase will also guide decision-making on the types of activities to engage in, and the approach (offline / online, hosted / independent).

This research is ideally done in person, or on the phone, but in a pinch you can also use a web-based survey tool like surveymonkey. Recruit research candidates from the list that you made during the Ecosystem Review. Develop an interview script that really probes their needs and expectations of your brand. Ask what types of marketing and advertising the members would find acceptable, and which types they won't. Ask if they would be willing to help shape programs and advertisements (if you choose to go that route), Themes of member need, expectation of conduct from your organization, and tolerance of advertising / marketing messages should emerge from this research.

Step 4. Community Strategy Development
This final phase will combine the inputs of business goals, user needs and the existing community audit to form a community strategy. Evaluating member need and business goals side by side should provide you with direction on the types of community opportunities to engage in. The ecosystem audit will provide direction on where to participate, and if there is an opportunity for your organization to host part of that conversation by building a destination site, hosting discussion groups, etc. Based on the content of the previous phases, the team should be able to pull together the following key areas of strategy:

Business goals: 3-5 points of value or reasons the organization is engaging in community-building activities
Member needs summary: 3-5 key needs community members have of your organization that can be fulfilled or supported via online community
Community ecosystem map: A list (or diagram) of the key communities and community members that are currently discussing your organization and/ or brand
Recommended community tactics: A list of key tactics that meet the business goals as well as member needs
Metrics / ROI strategy: Specific metrics to evaluate community-building efforts by, and an ROI model that articulates dimensions of value (loyalty, affinity, time engaged, etc)
Engagement plan / calendar: Key tactics mapped to specific dates

As with anything, you mileage may vary

Jake McKee has a great post about hiring a community manager.

Clearly people are looking for smart community people, and hopefully we look back on 2008 as the year community management because “standard”.

2008 is the year we "Work It". That will be a recurring theme this year

In the spirit of the new year, I wanted to encourage community managers, strategists and teams to do a bit of self-reflection on the old (2007) and planning for the new (2008).

The following are five key questions you and your team might explore in the coming weeks.

1. How are your members feeling?
This is a great time of year to put out a quick satisfaction survey. Conduct a web-based survey to ask members about the quality of the user experience, how they feel about the community, and if they would they recommend your community to their peers? Finally, ask about additional features or community touch-points members would like to see from you. 50 to 100 responses to this survey would be a great baseline. As I've mentioned before, tying this survey into any sort of customer satisfaction, loyalty or brand-tracking research you are doing will be quite insightful.

Web-based surveys are a great tool, but if you can get community members together in-person for a roundtable session, even better. If a Survey or in person Roundtable are too much overhead, pick up the phone and call 5-10 active members.

2. How is your staff?
The first of the year is also a great time to gather staff (or, if you are just one, to do some self-reflection) to think about what went well, and what didn't in 2007. What were the key learnings? Were your policies and guidelines clear, and did they address most issues. Were members generally happy and active? Did your key metrics grow / improve? Most importantly, how are your front line community managers feeling? Are they enthusiastic about another year participating in your community, or dreading it? If it is the latter, you have some work to do. This is also a good time to start looking around for talent on other teams. The demand for community managers, strategists and executives is only going to get worse in 2008, as more companies engage in online community building and social media activities. Hiring is one option, but growing / grooming internal candidates is another option, especially if your current community staff feels squeezed.

3. Who is sponsoring / how do budgets look?
Does you have a sponsoring executive that has a seat at the C table (or your orgs equivalent)? If not, find one! Or better, convert everyone! Seriously, this is also a great time of year for a community roadshow, to "tell the story of 2007". All the great conversations that happened, all the key wins, key points of friction. Community and social media has a lot of visibility with most organizations senior management right now, so take advantage. Also, most of you have your 08 community budgets planned, start thinking about 09. Seriously.

4. Got Goals?
Community metrics, and in particular, ROI are going to come under scrutiny this year. 06-07 were about convincing the unconverted that it was OK to say "community" again. A lot of efforts were funded on good faith. This year, many senior managers will want to see return. One of the biggest challenges community managers and executives will face is weaving together a "tapestry of value" that contains both quantitative and qualitative information. It is key to have a set of your community goals aligned with some of your overall organizational goals. On the other hand, it is also critical to convince executives that community features, like discussion groups and blogs, are now expected by the market.

5. Where else can you participate?
One of the things that really surprised me when working on community strategy project in 2007 was the tendency for community managers and strategists to just focus on properties they "owned", as opposed to reaching out to other adjacent community sites, social networks and bloggers. The metaphor I encourage folks to use is that of an ecosystem. There are many places your community members like to play, and your organization can potentially add value in many (but certainly not all) of those places.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the set of questions I asked. Did i miss something? Please drop me an email or leave a comment.

I had the pleasure of participating in a webinar yesterday with George Jaquette of Intuit and Aaron Strout of Shared Insights.

Aaron just posted the webinar archive and transcript on the Wearesmarter.com site.

Additionally, I wanted to post my notes from the event, which more or less sum up what I said (or meant to say: ) ).

Question 1: How do I create a value-driven community strategy?
It is important to remember that value is relative to your organization and also to your community. As an organization, you need to do some research (and soul searching) on why you want to host a community, what value you need to get out of the activity, and most importantly, what value YOU can bring to the table.
Hint: making your customers happy is generally a path to growth.


Question 2: Which metrics should I be measuring? (Measuring value in traditional and non-traditional ways)
The short answer? It depends on your community goals. It should be a mix of quantitative and qualitative.

Traditional Web Metrics ( a few examples)
Page views, time on site, referring sites, referring search engines, referring search terms

New Community / Social Media Metrics ( a few examples)
Member engagement: activity and "investment" in community
Member Loyalty & Satisfaction
Membership Growth and Attrition
Member referrals (also a sign of engagement),
Quality of content and exchange: For instance, resolution time, days thread was active, ratio of validated responses. Support communities are leading the way on best practices and reporting.
Tracking the brand through the “Community ecosystem”: Tracking brands and community members as they travel through the larger community ecosystem that spans sites, technologies and devices.
Impact of the community on revenue: Particular attention is being paid to the value of members, both to the host communities’ revenue, and the organization’s sales or fundraising.
Mobile interactions with the community: including views and posts from mobiles.

This question is explored more thoroughly in our Online Community Metrics 2007 report, which can be downloaded for free here.


Question 3: How do I manage my community, and how can I enlist my community to help?
First, you don't "manage" a community. You host. If your intention in engaging in community building activities is to manipulate the community in some way, don't bother. Members will run away in droves.
With that said, there is a role in every community for a manager or moderator that ensures that the community is a "clean, well lit place", or at least keeps to the culture and values expressed in the community policies. Policies and norms of expected behavior should be clearly articulated and easily accessible. This leaves the community moderator / manager to more interesting activities than deleting all the posts with "f@ck" in them, like actually participating in the community.

Give your community the tools to help manage the community , including the ability to rate and flag content, escalate issues to the moderator, and provide feedback on the user experience.

Find your influences and evangelists (typically, the most active (and positive) members), and put them on a pedestal. Sean O'Driscoll of MS has a lot of great things to say about the topic of engaging influencers.


Question 4: How do I grow my community without losing intimacy?
I'll be honest, I didn't exactly get this question. If you design a community UX poorly, event one with 100 members will feel anonymous.
My feedback was to basically grow from your base, and stick to your values and culture. Give members the ability to create subgroups, and allow members to create rich profiles.

Question 5: Within our company, who should blog and who shouldn’t?
Those with a point of view, subject matter expertise and a PERSONALITY should be blogging. I made the point that good blogging candidates in a company are likely already blogging outside of the company. Good corporate blogging often times feels like corporate "reality TV", providing access inside the corporate membrane in an informal, interesting and (hopefully) lighthearted way.

There were great questions via the phone, and a great back channel chat happening during the call. Again, the transcript can be found here.

You have probably been hearing the term "social graph" a lot in recent weeks.

Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook describes the concept in a recent Business Week article:

As he (Zuckerberg) describes it, this is a mathematical construct that maps the real-life connections between every human on the planet. Each of us is a node radiating links to the people we know. "We don't own the social graph," he says. "The social graph is this thing that exists in the world, and it always has and it always will. It's really most natural for people to communicate through it, because it's with the people around you, friends and business connections or whatever. What [Facebook] needed to do was construct as accurate of a model as possible of the way the social graph looks in the world. So once Facebook knows who you care about, you can upload a photo album and we can send it to all those people automatically."

Since the Business Week interview, it seems (at least to me) like the concept of the "Social Graph" has taken on a life of its own. The definitions of social graph (at least from what I've seen) range from the mathematical construct Zuckerburg describes, to a mapping of relationships in a particular network. Others have suggested that the social graph maps relationships as well as contains activity streams, semantic data, and more.

I'm trying to get my head around this, as I think many are. I tried to think of the smartest person I know who regularly studies social network theory, and Marc Smith from Microsoft Research immediately came to mind. Marc was kind enough to answer my questions via email, and a transcript of that conversation follows.

Q. What is your definition of the "Social Graph"? Can this concept be discussed outside the context of social network theory?

I do not think you can get away from the ideas in social network theory and still make any sense of the concept “social graph”.

Computer Mediated Communication systems are social networks.

“The Social Graph” just means that since Joseph Moreno’s 1934 work on sociograms, we recognize that [1] all entities are tied to other entities through relationships and [2] all relationships can be represented as directed graphs, node lists, and matrices, and that each of these data structures is amenable to further analysis. The current fad is just the ever growing awareness of these facts combined with a very real change in the costs of authoring, collecting, and analyzing these structures in digital media. In a social network nodes are people and edges or lines that connect the nodes are relationships.

Our social network research focuses on relationships in older forms of computer-mediated social network services like email lists, newsgroups, web boards and other repositories of threaded conversation. We found interesting “roles” like “answer person” (seen below).


We documented this “answer person role: in a paper we recently published in the Journal of Social Structure: “Visualizing the Signatures of Social Roles in Online Discussion Groups” which is available from: http://www.cmu.edu/joss/content/articles/volume8/Welser/

Some of the tools we used to do this study along with others are available from our website (http://www.research.microsoft.com/community/projects).

Our research points to the way to move from “page rank” to “people rank” by generating “social accounting metadata”. These measures of author behavior capture the structure of conversations and populations of community participants; the results can provide useful relevance ranking features for improving community search. Eric Brill published on the topic of making use of Netscan metadata as a feature of relevance ranking algorithms:

W. Xi, J. Lind and E. Brill, “Learning Effective Ranking Functions for Newsgroup Search,” SIGIR’04, Sheffield, UK, July 2004.

We have published a series of papers in which we demonstrate the value of social accounting metadata to identify authors who display behaviors that are clearly associated with a particular role or function, such as the relatively few “answer people” who provide much of the support in online discussions.

Tammara Turner, Marc Smith, Danyel Fisher and Howard Ted Welser, Picturing Usenet: Mapping computer-mediated collective action, Journal of Computer mediated Communication, September 2005.
Viégas, Fernanda B., Marc Smith. "Newsgroup Crowds and AuthorLines: Visualizing the Activity of Individuals in Conversational Cyberspaces", Proceedings of Hawaii International Conference on Software and Systems (HICSS) 2004.

'Answer people,' the folks who contribute much of the value in the Internet, are a small minority of all online users. Our paper reports that less than 2% of authors in Usenet newsgroups are likely to be the helpful 'answer person' type — authors who reply to many other people with brief replies. Information visualizations highlight the difference between these helpful folks and other types of contributors. Of course, the remarkable things is that so few can provide so much to so many.

Q: Does the concept of the social graph deserve the media attention it's been getting of late?
Yes. Yes. A critical social structure is suddenly becoming very visible and computable in ways that are novel. I am impressed!

Q: Besides Facebook, what other sites or companies are doing interesting things with the "social graph"?
Everything that is about bringing people into contact with people creates a social graph, so all sorts of things are in this space. Email is about social graphs, it just often lacks the UI for the data structures it generates. That is changing, of course. Now there are applications that natively focus on the directed graph as their data structure. That is new as wellFor example, have you noticed that most email clients let you create contact records for each person you know but almost no email clients allow those contacts to have relationships to one another. Applications that generate one data structure do not always have mechanisms to read or analyze that data structure, or only gain those features as they mature.

Marc's suggestions for further reading & listening:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_theory
http://www.insna.org/
Audio: Listen to Marc Smith's portion of the OCLC Symposium

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?

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.