This month's Expert Interview is with Christine Perey, Analyst and freelance associate of Informa Telecoms & Media. Christine has a truly global view of the topic of mobile social networking as a former Bay Area resident who now resides in Switzerland. Christine was kind enough to spend time answering several questions about mobile-based social networking below and expands on some of the findings published in the new Informa Telecoms and Media report, Mobile Social Networking: Communities and Content on the Move.


Christine's Bio:
Christine Perey is an analyst with over 15 years experience in new and emerging multimedia communications markets. She is a freelance associate of Informa Telecoms & Media and a regular contributor to Informa’s Mobile Media information service.

Christine was the publisher and editor of The QuickTime Forum from 1991-1993 and the founder of The QuickTime Movie Festival. Christine is an invited speaker at industry events and serves on boards, panels and committees dedicated to the advancement of rich media experiences in business and consumer markets. In 2008 Informa Telecoms & Media published Mobile Social Networking: Community and Content on the Move, the most comprehensive market research report on mobile communities, researched and written by Christine. Previously, she authored the Personal Mobile Video Communications market research report published by Wainhouse Research in 2006.
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Q: What are the key differences you see in the mobile market in the states vs. Europe and Asia? Specifically, what are the key barriers to innovation in the US?

A: As far as the general topic of mobile services for consumers and businesses is concerned, there are dramatic regional differences. For example, in the US, most (somewhere over 90%) subscribers are under contract, meaning that they receive a bill every month for the services they used in the prior 30 days. When a service provider has a guaranteed revenue stream, they are less likely to innovate than when people are changing operators every week or month. Also, until relatively recently, both in-bound and out-bound calls were charged and the consumer or business contracted for a flat rate monthly plan based on the “block” of minutes. This affects how people use the phone service (it lowers the tendency to give out the mobile number, for example). By contrast, in European and Asian markets, pre-paid services and dialing party pays are the rules, not the exceptions. People “top up” the phone cards in their phones and can change carriers any day of the week. Many have two phones (with two different carriers). There’s a good article on the US cellular market performance with some of Analysis Research’s recent report findings. Here’s a snippet:

Analysis Research predicts that total annual subscriber growth in the US nationwide could fall to 2 percent a year by 2012, compared with the 11 percent to 14 percent growth posted by the three wireless carriers, AT&T, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile USA. But add in Sprint Nextel, which posted two consecutive quarters of subscriber losses, and the total annual subscriber growth last year for the top four carriers dropped to 9 percent – the slowest growth in a decade.

Technologies for mobile networks are not the same around the world. In the US and most of Latin and South America, the technology is based primarily (with the exception of AT&T Wirless/Cingular network and T-Mobile which are GSM/UMTS) on CDMA2000 which is a different radio technology than what was adopted and deployed in Western (and most of the Eastern block) Europe and Japan. In Europe and in many other parts of the world where advanced mobile services are offered, the technology is GSM which is the predecessor of WCDMA and the step up (to UMTS-3G) is relatively easy. There are proponents of these different technologies in each camp, for sure, but the bottom line is that due to the fact that these differences exist today, some mobile services are easier to build or deploy and will advance/develop more rapidly in some regions than others. In Europe, the UK and Italy are very advanced markets for mobile but for different reasons.

In Japan and Korea, mobile network services are the most advanced in the world, although the UK is not far behind. The competition among carriers and the penetration is high (exceeding one handset per person). Let’s look at Japan to compare and contrast the drivers of innovation, getting to your question about possible barriers to innovation in the US market. In Japan, NTT DoCoMo had the foresight in the mid- or late1990s to create an environment where a rich ecosystem for application developers could develop. In addition to having developer APIs and other tools, they provided a strong financial incentive for developers who created new services on their network. The developers in the i-Mode ecosystem would receive 20-30% of the revenues charged by the mobile operator for the services. The economic reward system is an important driver of innovation but the mobile network operators in the US market have adopted a strong “walled garden” approach where they and only they choose the services offered and if the successful services are provided by a third party, even then the “cut” of the action (revenues) which returns to the application developer is much lower (5-10%).

Despite the regional differences in regulation, markets, technologies and revenue sharing strategies, mobile communities are rapidly expanding in all parts of the world! I don’t have hard statistics to provide about on-deck and off-deck community tendency, but my impression is that mobile communities are making themselves easy to find and people are looking for them on their mobiles. Subscribers are looking for community services on the mobile operator’s deck as well as on the Mobile Web.

One of the barriers to subscribers using mobile communities is the cost of the data traffic. We’ve all heard and many have experienced the sticker shock when you download large files to a mobile handset or do a lot of surfing. In countries, such as Japan, Korea, UK and a few other European markets, there are flat-rate, all-you-can-eat data tariffs offered, which really reduce the barrier to using the mobile data services such as mobile communities. These are catching on and where available, User-Generated Content and mobile community services are high on the list of compelling reasons to take a flat rate data plan with your contract.

In addition to the mobile operator related regional differences, it is clear that there are also economic and societal differences which influence the rate of mobile community adoption. I’ll just look at a few of these non-operator factors to make my point. In many (most) economically less well developed regions of the world (outside the Western and Japanese economies), the mobile handset will be people’s first and only access to the Internet. The number of mobile phones has already exceeded the number of Web connected PCs. Increasingly these mobile phones are capable of accessing data services such as mobile communities. It’s not a question of choice, there just aren’t broadband Internet services available at affordable prices, or the PC in the home or office is shared among an entire family or group of people and you don’t want to have your community experience to be shared by your parents or siblings! The mobile handset personal experience is private and personalized and for some services, dating, for example—a very popular mobile community service—it’s not the type of experience you want to be doing in a living room with people around.

Like in web communities, there are strong cultural drivers which influence the appeal of communities and the feature popularity. In Asian markets, digital gifting is very popular. In Japan, people love to view UGC on their mobile, but are more conservative than Americans when creating their own content. In the US market, more subscribers are exhibitionists with their camera phones.


Q: Why doesn't having international players like T-Mobile help spur innovation and openness in the domestic US market?

A: T-Mobile has operated a very innovative service in the US market called MyFaves and after over a year of success it has expanded this service to Germany, the UK and elsewhere. Please read about this.
Mobile network operator groups, such as Hutchison Whampoa, Telefonica, Orange and Vodafone are very actively pursuing mobile community partnerships and view these services as important to their differentiation and competitive advantage both within a country and between geographies. Mobile communities, like their web cousins, need critical mass to continue growing. Having the ability to reach people on other networks in other regions is very valuable as some of the larger chat communities (e.g. Jumbuck and AirG) have shown.

One of the things we know that users are against is being in a walled garden in their community. Since mobile network operators can prevent the subscribers of other operator networks from joining a community, this can reduce the viral effect. If I’m an Orange customer and you are an O2 subscriber, we should still be able to be friends in the community. This is one of the great appeals to being off-deck or at the very least to join communities which are independently operated.

Q: What are the most interesting trends you are seeing in the mobile social networking space, and where (geographically) are they happening?

A: Mobile communities that offer people the ability to find others with like interests or to meet the numerous other human needs they have over the course of their days and lives, are blossoming. They are not copycats of web communities. Rather they are evolving in their own unique directions because people are taking risks and experimenting.

One of the things that we see increasingly is the desire on the part of community participants to take part in the mobile economy. In other words, those who are driving a lot of traffic for advertising or downloads want to get a fraction of the community host’s revenues. The systems which reward users with points or internal currencies are quickly going to link with recommendations. If I recommend that you go see or purchase something within our community and you trust me and follow that advice, then I should get a reward. Consumers will, over time, become the purveyors of micro-advertising campaigns. If I like a brand of hair product, computer or a sports team, and your transaction is influenced by my preferences, the community will track these social shopping patterns. This isn’t unique to the mobile communities. It is likely to be implemented and adopted well in mobile because the identity of the users is known to the platform provider based on a unique relationship they have with their phone and the mobile network operator.

In parallel with the evolution of communities, community features will be integrated to many if not all digital experiences both mobile and online. In the future, a social networking service will struggle to survive and attract new users simply by providing a social networking functionality as a core service. Instead, the features and functions will be offered as part of other services helping to drive personalization (through the data gathered), drive loyalty and to drive sales. At least this will be possible when a set of universally accepted community user feature-centered standards are developed, ratified and integrated into all future platforms.


Q: What key trends should online community and social media professionals pay attention to?

A: There is a great deal of uncertainty in this market, but the dimensions of the opportunity and the number and types of companies participating in the industry indicate that Mobile Social Networking is going to improve quickly and the service themes at its core – meeting the needs of people to stay in touch and feel that they belong to a group, to be entertained, to increase their productivity, to make a difference or have an impact – will persist over time.

In the future, entertainment will be very different as a result of mobile devices that enable sharing of digital content. According to Nokia’s research entitled A Glimpse of the Next Episode, published in December 2007, approximately 25% of the entertainment consumed by people in 2012 will have been created, edited and shared within ‘peer circles’ rather than produced and distributed by professional firms and studios. As a result of the popularity of online and mobile services like Mobile Social Networking, people will be accustomed to sharing their ‘instant’ social media with people they know as well as with people they have just met. In parallel, they will be learning to use the new tools at their disposal and developing collaborative media skills that will prove more rewarding and engaging than passively watching, reading or hearing the entertainment media produced by the impersonal entertainment powerhouses.

Future mobile devices will have better microphones, perhaps even microphone arrays combining multiple mobile devices into ad hoc sensor networks, for superior capture of sound, such as music and speech. In addition to sound and video, the mobile device will detect other users in the vicinity and, if they are known and part of a user’s community, applications will automatically embed tags associating faces and voices with names.

In some high-end devices, continuous measuring and monitoring of a user’s surroundings will detect when to begin and end a capture sequence, automatically zooming and focusing on items of interest. Since social media is rarely visible from inside a pocket or purse, mobile devices for social media capture will more likely be wearable, mounted on the user’s glasses or hat.

Systems in the mobile handset will permit the manual or automatic annotation of social media with information such as the place, the date and time, the objects in a scene and possibly more ‘human factor’ data such as the emotion of the user. By associating metadata at the time of the capture, the social media blending tools will have the ability to identify whose media was used in an edited composition, as well as to remove or hide people who do not wish to be identified or heard.

Q: What are your recommendations to those hosting and operating online communities?

A: Providers of community services aimed at the broadband-connected PC users are already using three of the four strategies available to them to expand the reach and use of their platforms to include mobile devices. The first strategy is to build a WAP version of the online services. Many add some value to the user by offering the option of receiving alerts when the platform detects community-relevant events via MT SMS and permit message management and viewing using the handset. Orkut and Facebook have used this strategy to date. MySpace also offers a WAP portal interface among its other strategies.

The benefit of this strategy is that it gets a rudimentary level of service deployed, so that the early adopters can at least browse and check their communities when mobile. So far, few of the online community providers using this strategy have enabled the rich social media features which the users of mobile handsets would most like to see. This is because the level of investment necessary for re-architecting the service platform for correct display and formatting is high, given the online community operator’s lack of historical concern with device management, and difficult to justify based on their existing banner ad revenue models. In the future, this strategy should persist and improve as online communities acquire the expertise necessary to build robust mobile community platforms or gateways to their existing services.

The second strategy is to port the online service features to a mobile operator’s proprietary service environment. This is essentially what MySpace did with Helio and, to a far lesser extent, with Vodafone. The service is offered on-deck and is easy for the user to log in, especially if an application or applet is installed. This strategy will also persist and involve pre-loaded applications on feature-rich handsets for mobile community services and social media.

The third strategy is partnering with a mobile community platform provider, such as InterCasting. Bebo and Piczo are among those choosing this strategy for their mobile service access. By using a mobile community platform and aggregation service, the online community reaches the largest number of potential registrants. As long as the community keeps its service brand and feature set, this is a sound strategy and significantly reduces the time-to-market. Other online communities are likely to follow this route when it is proven both from a technology integration and business model perspective.

The final strategy that has yet to be tested is for an online community provider to partner directly with a popular independent mobile community operator. The technologies for creating the gateway between the two will need to be proprietary but need not depend on a third party developer and could evolve at the speed that the two partners require. One of the reasons that this has not been properly explored yet is that mobile community service providers have not, to date, seen much advantage in this. However, as more broadband-connected PC users seek to access via mobile, the overlap between the two access types will drive the dialogue around potential partnerships.

To be successful with a mobile strategy, online communities will need to make a more significant investment to understand and meet the needs of mobile community participants than they have to date. Well-designed surveys, free trials such as that conducted by Sulake, the provider of Habbo Hotel, and the engagement with mobile community industry experts will all contribute to the education of the online community operator.

The most challenging domain for online community service providers to tackle will be in the area of revenue. As community participants have become accustomed to having access at no cost, they are reluctant to begin paying for equivalent or inferior services. As the mobile advertising market heats up and brands feel more comfortable with their community campaigns, this obstacle will gradually decline.


About PEREY Research & Consulting
PEREY Research & Consulting builds and leads senior management teams conducting and applying market research. Component and systems vendors, network operators and value added service providers rely on Perey Research to tap emerging multimedia technology trends, and to devise and implement new business development strategies in light of these trends.

I got to pose a few questions to the super-busy (and super-smart) Ross Mayfield, Chairman of Socialtext, last week. I wanted to get his take on the state of the social software industry in ligh of the fact that we are likely headed in to a recession, as well as his opinion on the "state of the wiki".



Bill: You have been in the community and collaboration space for some time. What are the key online trends you are tracking as web2.0 hype starts to die down and the specter of a recession looms?

Ross: We started Socialtext in the last recession, back in 2002. Its interesting that Social Software took hold then, perhaps people took to blogging when they were unemployed. But seriously, there are some key trends that will continue regardless of the hype cycle and macroeconomic conditions:
- NetGens, the first generation to grow up with the internet throughout their lives, are in their second year of employment after college. This is the largest demographic shift, at the same time when the Baby Boom generation is retiring, and will have a profound impact on adoption of social software, organizational culture and work preferences and styles.
- The Consumerization of IT, where innovation happens first in consumer markets, is adapted for the enterprise or driven by individuals serving themselves with SaaS and Open Source alternatives without IT
- Individuals trust peers more than institutions to inform their decisions. This not only impacts consumer marketing, but politics and management.
- Its become common for people to express a facet of their identity publicly on the net, and values of transparency over privacy are changing
- The cost of personal publishing and forming groups that can take action is falling to zero
- Enterprise Social Software is being treated as a serious category of enterprise software by executives and IT, especially as more case studies demonstrate business value.

As we enter into a recession, enterprise budgets will tighten, but it remains to be seen if the relative low cost of Social Software solutions are impacted. We have seen a change in Financial Services, but so far its fairly contained. However, the US isn't the only market where companies have difficulties collaborating.


Bill: How has the role of the wiki in online communities changed over the last 2-3 years. What has surprised you?

Ross: We have seen the use case evolve from small groups of technical users doing project communication and lightweight documentation, to non-technical users as usability improved. Mass collaboration started to be realized a couple of years ago, where wikis are testing the scaling limit of productive communities. Now we are seeing process-specific implementations to enhance productivity and sustainable innovation, in solution areas like collaborative intelligence between marketing and the Field, participatory knowledgebases fo service and support, flexible client communication for professional services and business social networks for partners and customers.

Bill: What is on the Horizon for Socialtext?

Ross: While we advance the state of the art for wikis as a tool and the best practices for deriving value from them, I think you will see Socialtext become more social. There is a lot of room for innovation in this large marketing opportunity.

This month's Online Community Expert interview is with Robin Harper, VP Marketing and Community Development for Linden Lab, creator of the virtual world Second Life. Like many of you, I have experimented with Second Life over the last couple of years and have been left wanting something a bit more engaging. I gave Second Life a second look when I heard that Linden had added voice chat, and after seeing orgs like TechSoup (see Susan Tenby's interview from December) getting real value out of in world meetings. I reached out to Robin, and she was kind enough to spend some time with me answering questions from the perspective of a"second look at Second Life".

Q: Could you start with some basic stats about Second Life?

A: There were 921,554 unique people logged-in to Second Life last month (January 2008), who spent over 28 million hours. 45% of that use was women, 55% men. The world now consists of 16,816 regions, for a total size of 426 square miles (San Francisco is 49 square miles). There were nearly 18 million L$transactions among Residents, with average daily volume on the LindeX currency exchange of US$265,528. The top five countries (by use) with populations in Second Life are the United States, Germany, Japan, United Kingdom and France. For more information, please see http://secondlife.com/whatis/economy_stats.php.


Q: There was a tremendous amount of media coverage about Second Life in late 06 and early 07, which seemed to result in a bit of a backlash after a few high profile marketing experiments (American Apparel) ended badly. How did the attention effect your thinking about product direction and the core value of Second Life?

A: There are always up and down cycles in the media, and as Second Life went through an enormous growth phase, the press responded very positively to the wide range of social and entrepreneurial activity. Eventually they were bound to focus on one or two projects that were less than successful. The important thing to keep in mind is that sometimes a lack of success has as more to do with the project design than with Second Life, and that sometimes projects end because they're finished, not because they failed.

We continue to believe that Second Life offers the best and most flexible platform for development of 3D, immersive experiences. To help ensure the success of large scale projects we are working closely with the over 300 companies that have grown up in Second Life and are now providing consulting and content development services to their corporate and educational customers. We're helping them define best practices for successful projects, and making sure they have access to the tools and support they need.


Q: Is there a place for in world marketing of real world brands?

A: We've seen many well-recognized brands engage in successful projects within Second Life. Scion and Intel, Adidas, Reebok, Pontiac, Reuters... the list goes on. One of our Residents made a video about it: http://youtube.com/watch?v=tEGHJuCbGdo. I think the thing to remember is that the most successful projects are those whose creators realize that this is not a medium in the traditional sense -- it's not about reach and frequency, or impressions. The value of marketing within Second Life comes from having the opportunity to involve potential and current customers in an experience that they can help to design. From this you can learn an awful lot about their perceptions of your brand and products that is far richer than any focus group.


Q: Who do you consider the key audiences for Second Life, and what are the key points of value for these audiences?

A: Second Life has become a development platform which attracts a wide range of people with an unlimited number of ideas. In the consumer arena there are people from around the world who are starting businesses ranging from the unexpected (magic wands!) to the more traditional (apparel and home furnishings). For them Second Life offers new opportunities for entrepreneurship relative to the real world -- the difference being that their customer base is global and their costs are comparatively low. On the social side people attend concerts and the theatre, throw parties, go skiing and ice skating. The benefits of online community are well-known to the readers of this newsletter -- a removal of geographic constraints and an opportunity to make new friends you'd otherwise never meet. And you don't have to pay for lift tickets.

In addition to the consumer aspect of Second Life, corporations are finding it a place to hold meetings with global employees and customers, to build prototypes, to create showrooms. Educators simulate everything from 3D molecular structure to game design. The value lies in the simulation and design capabilities coupled with the ability to bring together groups of people from nearly anywhere in the world.

Q: What are the new features or services that get the folks at Linden excited? What is on the horizon?

A: We're in the process of building new search features into the Second Life world, making it easier to find things to do or the essentials of virtual life, from shoes to French lessons. We think the simple fact of web-based indexing will make Second Life more accessible to a broader base of users. On the graphics side our new Windlight technology is opening up capabilities for environmental effects that are simply beautiful. Second Life Residents have been experimenting with atmospheric enhancement to add mood to their builds and are showing off the results on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=windlight&w=all.

We see nothing but potential on the horizon as the world continues to grow and diversify. Of course there are challenges brought on by the intersection of real world and virtual, but in the end we believe there is a net gain in the creation of new economic and social value.

This month's Online Community Expert interview is with Susan Tenby of CompuMentor / TechSoup. Susan is an expert at community building, and is pioneering new techniques and interactions in the virtual world Second Life.

Susan's Bio:
Susan Tenby is the Senior Manager of Online Community Development at TechSoup, where she is responsible for the promotion, management and direction of the TS community forums, with an audience of 100,000 unique visitors a month.
She recently launched a community of over 400 nonprofit staff members and volunteers in Second Life. This community has a shared community blog at http://www.nonprofitcommons.org <http://secondlife.techsoup.org> and a wiki about nonprofit activities in SL. They have a shared community tagging project using the tag “NPSL” (Nonprofits in Second Life) on sites such as del.icio.us, Technorati and Flickr, weekly in-world meetings, every Friday from 8:30-9:30am PST to teach scripting and best-practices to nonprofits in SL.

She launched a sim in Second Life called The Nonprofit Commons, with the NPSL community, on land and buildings, all donated by Anshe Chung Studios. This nonprofits-only sim houses 40 organizations, free of charge, to lower the barrier of access to the virtual world.

She runs monthly online community meet-ups in San Francisco. She speaks at conferences (in June, she organized a panel on Nonprofits in Second Life at Games for Change on Virtual Activism and presented on Using Second Life an innovative marketing tool at Supernova2007.) In August, she spoke at SLCC and in October, she presented at Faster Cures and Using Second Life for Social Work. She also writes on the topic of online community building in its various forms.

Q: What is the Nonprofit Commons?

A: We are a group of nonprofit employees and volunteer friends of nonprofits who believe that there is merit and much potential in collaboarating and working in Second Life. Our group lauched in May of 2006, and we have grown to about 400 members. We currently have a nonprofits-only island, where we house nonprofit organizations for free, we hold weekly, open town-hall meetings, every Friday, from 8:30am-9:30/10ish. In these meetings, we talk about ways to use the interactive technology to build community and eventually, to achieve our missions to change the world. We also have a community blog (nonprofitcommons.org), community tagging project (tag is NPSL for nonprofits in Second Life), wiki (linked form blog) with shared resources and free shared tools for nonprofits using the virtual world. We go to live and virtual conferences and throw mixed-reality events where avatars interact with people in the real-world room.

Q: What advantage do you see in using an immersive world like second life, over a more traditional social networking site?

A: With Second Life, you can augment reality, by using the fact that you can build your own tools and experiences to share your ideas with little cost to do so. You can show a group of people a vision and invite them to interact within that vision, in a way that text chat or videos will not accommodate. You can use virtual worlds to make animated stories or movies, through an easy process called Machinima. SL can provide you with a creative avenue to express what is not possible in the real world, while also allowing for a live teleconferencing environment which will eventually integrate with outside technologies, positioning it well for online learning environments. SL is live and can accommodate many languages simultaneously through internal translator tools, like the Babbler. I see SL as a hybrid between a website, a social networking platform, a webinar and an animation studio, where fairly un-technical end users can achieve some fairly complex tasks, with ready-made tools that are free-to-nearly free. Second Life also allows for anonymous self-expression and freedom from logistical, sociological and economic confines. For more information on this see: http://nonprofitcommons.org/node/174 and http://www.techsoup.org/community/Secondlife

Q: What have been your team’s key learnings to date with the project?

1. It is essential to organize your volunteers and empower them to take on their own ideas and implement them. It is not helpful to have a room full of good ideas with no one to take responsibility to implement them. I had to learn to stop trying to get all the ideas done by myself and I was forced to accept that everyone has a role and anyone can find one thing they are good at to help the community, no matter how small. If you can’t think of what you could do, be the one to organize the volunteers, or put them to task by being the note-taker.

2. I have had to learn to not take it personally if people don’t agree with my choices in structuring the community. There is no right or wrong way to do community, as we know. This is a fuzzy science, and we make a lot of it up as we go along. Just trust that your vision is right, and stick to it, while also being open to variances of opinion, but never try to please everyone, or you will get nothing done.

3. Enlist your most opinionated and helpful volunteers and create a “management group” of sorts. Connect with them every month, outside of the larger group, if possible, through a conference call, take their agenda items and and help them help make the community a success by forming the structure of your community with their ideas and your vision.


Q: What advice would you have for other organizations thinking about establishing a community presence in second life?

A: I would recommend that they listen to my learnings above and that they actually spend some serious time in-world, before they decide that they are a community manager in SL. This is a much more challenging community to manage than an asynchrous forum or email list, for example. People who are into the platform, at this point, tend to be leaders, innovators, and seasoned techies. In my observation, not many even think of it as an online community. They are not accustomed to following the lead of a community manager, or behaving in a way that is always conducive to productive online activity. SL is the type of environment that tends to attract the types of people who want to make the world what they want it to become, due to the nature of the client. That is, you can create your own content in-world, so who is to say how you should behave, what you should look like, what you should wear (or not wear, much to my horror, in one instance), or how you should proceed within a community of other volunteers. Many people are there to check it out, not necessarily to participate in a community endeavor. Feel free to befriend people in SL whom you may not necessarily have much in common with, as they may know tricks about the tool or ways to work within its limitations that could help you in the future. If you have volunteers offering to help you realize your vision, make sure that you have back-up volunteers for their roles. Many people get very excited about the technology and then lose steam, interest or time to finish what they started, as is the case in any volunteer effort. If you can have repeat events (like our weekly Friday meetings) and establish patterns of behavior and appropriate conduct, the community will eventually adopt this way of behaving as a standard, and you will have a more thriving, exciting, creative and active community.

This month's Online Community Expert interview is with Joi Podgorny of Ludorum, Inc. Joi's area of expertise is the post-Facebook crowd, Tweens and Children.

Joi's Bio:
Joi has worked the past decade building and managing safe, online communities for kids, as well as developing and implementing strategies in the realms of digital production, integrated marketing, and youth interactive research with such companies as Nicktoons, YTV/Corus, ABC (Australia), Kraft/Post Cereals, Neopets, Sparktop, and Boys and Girls Clubs of America. Ludorum is dedicated to developing, acquiring and marketing intellectual entertainment properties, in both the new interactive distribution channels as well as classic linear TV. At Ludorum, Joi leads the integration of interactive/online strategies into Ludorum's television, publishing and toy properties.

It has been said before a ton of times, but I will keep saying it until it becomes common knowledge - Communities are hard work. They take resources to design and plan, but more importantly, they take resources to maintain.

What are the major online community and social media trends you have been paying attention to in the last 12 months?

Wow, September last year seems so long ago, doesn't it? I guess the predominant social media trend that I have found myself coming back to this year has been Immersive Gaming Environments, especially Virtual Worlds. It is definitely the newest generation/iteration of online community and it has been a very interesting year in that space.

The most important development from the explosion of Virtual Worlds we have seen this year is that more expanded definitions are being sought for what "virtual worlds" actually means. No longer are Second Life, Everquest and WOW the only examples people can name. Online community folks can name multiple virtual and dynamic worlds, as well as platforms and tools that are used daily in these environments. There are now offerings for multiple different populations of users and demographics - and the space is only going to expand in the next 12 months.

I think another aspect that will be interesting to watch in this space is how these environments will (or will not) become financially viable. Assimilating marketing and advertising messages into communities is very tricky in any context and this year we have seen some very heavy-handed attempts in Virtual Worlds specifically. That said, these pioneers are making these mistakes for everyone else. We should start to see less obvious attempts at marketing in these worlds in the months to come. Hopefully, the Marketers will start to realize what the Online Community Managers know to be true, which is that you have to get to know your community before you can market to them. Everyone could benefit from learning how to become a member of the community they are targeting, involving the community in the decision making process and, sometimes, deciding against marketing specific items to them because of the wisdom gained from the community.


Your work tends to focus on Tweens and children. How is that different than working with the current adult Internet population? Are their needs and habits significantly different?

I like the question regarding whether kids' needs are different than adults' needs online. My answer is yes and no. Adults are usually more aware of their multiple identities, both on and offline. They have their work personality, their friends' personality, their (seemingly) anonymous online personalities, etc and they are more able to see the lines of distinction between these identities. Kids also have multiple identities but they are less paranoid about separating them. Many kids, teens and young adults are comfortable with living aspects of their lives very publicly, online. I see pros and cons to both ways of identity juggling. Adults seem to have a better grasp (again, usually) on the ramifications of their actions and will/should act accordingly. Kids/Teens are freer in their identity exploration and therefore, they are able to learn so much more than if they were in a more protected stance.

One aspect that I think hasn't been looked at as thoroughly as it could have been, is how to deal with late tween/early teen audiences specifically. We have reached a point in our industry where there are handful of people with experience in managing youth communities. We know about moderation, COPPA compliance, filters and the like. Communities/Virtual Worlds like Club Penguin and Webkinz cater to younger children and their parents and have very strict parameters regarding how communication happens between users. But the population that I think needs more attention is that of kids between 11-15 (and the outliers). These young adults are huge communicators online, but are sometimes held back from their true potential due to the strict and rather archaic ideologies as to how they are allowed to interact online. Don't get me wrong, I am a youth online privacy advocate from the old school, but I think we need to look at the legislation and rules we put in place years ago, and see if any updates need to be made to accommodate where our communities have evolved. If we don't, I think we could miss out on some great opportunities for everyone online, not just kids and teens.

What do you see as the most significant opportunity to use online community for social good? What about for commercial purposes?

There is some great stuff happening in the online community space in regards to social good. Tons of awareness is being virally spread for seemingly infinite causes. Facebook and other social networking sites have become distribution channels for their members’ causes du jour. NFPs have resources like NTEN to offer tech and community driven resources for research and development. There is a move from raising awareness to creating action that is starting to happen everywhere in our society and it’s especially present online. The "armchair activists" who felt they were affecting change by clicking on a button online everyday or adding a badge to their profile are evolving into people craving a more substantial involvement and a desire to actually make the change happen. The Zazengo platform, launching this fall, is an example of how new tools and networks online are helping facilitate this sea change. They will offer a shared engine which enables organizations and individuals to lead their social networks in focused, on the ground, grass-roots action projects. It's kind of like the missing operating system for "think globally, act locally" - with the new emphasis on the "act" part.

As far as community for commercial purposes, that's a BIG umbrella. I deal in the entertainment realm, which is exciting as we have the impetus and usually the budgets to push the boundaries of the interactive experience. MTV/Nickelodeon (Viacom) and Disney, among many others, are always able to make a big showing in this space. If we can start to articulate solid and positive directions for online communities and then have them carried out through those distribution channels, the future for online communities in general will look very positive indeed.

What should every CEO know about online communities?

It has been said before a ton of times, but I will keep saying it until it becomes common knowledge - Communities are hard work. They take resources to design and plan, but more importantly, they take resources to maintain. This rule is true whether you are making your own community or partnering with someone else's for a specific initiative. The decision to add online community to your strategy is one that should not be taken lightly. It's like having a child - there is planning before and then continually after. And just like a child, managing an online community is difficult, frustrating, rewarding, and amazing all at the same time - in short, very complicated. Think about if and how you will be able to manage the community and all of it's probable and unpredictable evolutions BEFORE deciding to add it to your portfolio. The time and money spent will be worth it.

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


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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other examples:

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

This month's Online Community Expert interview is with Bill Binenstock of CBS Interactive. In the interview Bill discussed the CBS SportsLine online community. It is rare that the Online Community Report gets access to a very senior person at a leading media company. Further, Bill was very candid in his responses, particularly his observations and experiences with CBS Interactive.

Bill Binenstock's Bio:
Bill Binenstock is the Senior Vice President of Core Services Integration for CBS Interactive.

CBS Interactive is the digital division of CBS Corporation, managing the CBS.com, CBS SportsLine.com, CBSNews.com and theShowBuzz.com websites and building new extensions of CBS into alternative online and mobile devices.

The Core Services Integration team provides foundational services for CBS Interactive. These services support existing operations, on one hand, while facilitating the integration of new products, partners, capabilities and applications into the growing CBS Interactive portfolio on the other.

The group provides indirect infrastructure set-up in areas such as analytics, legal oversight and back-end systems as well as direct support for Customer Service, Product Management and Customer Insight.


To start, could you please provide an overview of the CBS SportsLine community?

BINENSTOCK: To some degree, sports is an area in which communities come pre-formed. Most fans have connections to players, teams, sports, schools, cities, conferences or even leagues.

Where fans decide to experience their sports entertainment is the question. For a fan, it can be a bar, a living room, a park, a gymnasium, a stadium or a buddy's back yard.

What we set out to do with the CBS SportsLine message boards is provide fans one more avenue for sports interaction -- one that is highly attractive to them because it reaches a much larger potential audience.

This is both the challenge and the opportunity in a nutshell: how does a big media company provide fans a venue that's entertaining, safe, useful and vibrant?

In CBS' case, we had a leg up because of our experience in Fantasy sports. Fantasy sports sites are among the first social networks built on the web. In Fantasy, members form groups, set rules, design avatars, build histories and invite friends. Site producers labor to build software that facilitates all these interactions.


Community-Driven Design
Understanding how different types of Fantasy groups interact can provide designers significant insight.

For example, in Fantasy we offer both single games and commissioner games. These are industry terms that denote two types of consumer interaction: in a single game it's interaction with a small group of relative strangers (at least at the outset), and in a commissioner game, it's interaction with a group of close friends.

This experience provided us significant insight into what and how both sets of communities interact. It's taught us about the importance of things like persona, governance, reputation, trust, moderation and value.

We used many of the things we've learned in Fantasy when we redesigned our message boards last summer.

Our approach was to provide a venue for high-quality, user-generated sports commentary on our site. We wanted to increase and enhance what our audience was already doing through their feedback with us; namely, they comment, second guess, criticize and extol, and in many cases, they did so in a tremendously entertaining fashion.

Community Management & Influencer Program
We've tried to separate the CBS SportsLine discussion from others on the web by focusing attention on these top contributors. To do this, we set up a model that lets the community itself designate who these people are.

The community does this by its actions: by rating content, by selecting favorite members and by frequently participating.

It was important to us to have a system that provided a measure of self-governance, that encouraged frequent, positive contributions and that identified community leaders and their extraordinary content.

So, we devised the CBS SportsLine Reputation System, which ranks members based on four criteria: Connections, Value, Participation and Skills. These combine to form one's community ranking as either an Amateur, a Rookie, a Pro, an All-Star or a Superstar.

With each segmentation, come more capabilities and influence within the community.

We also included a feedback loop so that the community could more efficiently govern itself. If members find content they deem questionable, they can flag it as such and our moderators will investigate.

Infractions can lead to warnings or even bannings, and false alarms are also penalized.

To be sure, we actively review the boards to identify anything that does not conform with our Terms of Use, but the System itself significantly aids in this process.

Additionally, the System has a built-in behavioral deterrent: someone who has invested significant time and effort in achieving a high stature in the community will be cautious about putting that reputation at risk with a potentially distasteful posting, an obscene avatar or use of vulgar language.

Growth & Participation
Since the launch last August, we've registered over 100,000 new CBS members, and on any given day between 40,000 and 150,000 visitors reach a message board.

These new registrants are important to the future development of the boards. Their interactions with each other and with CBS can give us greater understanding about what is working and what is not.

Another, somewhat unexpected benefit has been the unusually consistent consumption we've seen thus far.

Consistent with the rest of our site, message board visitors come more frequently during peak times such as the NFL season and March Madness, but the boards remain surprisingly stable even during the normal lulls of the sports season.

Like most communities, it's the top 10% that does the bulk of the actual content creation, and like most communities, the rest of the consumption comes from the 90% who just enjoy following the discussion.

Our message board's population is very similar in makeup to CBS SportsLine's: it's 96% male. 40% are 18-30 and 40% are 31-45. There is little international participation, and what there is comes predominantly from the English-speaking world.

We view our communities as vibrant and constantly changing organisms, so they require constant nurturing, feedback and enhancements. Our System gives us an opportunity to do all of this and then return the value back to the community.

In most respects, our relationship with the CBS SportsLine community has only scratched the surface. They've already provided us multiple insights which will lead to improvements in the next iteration of the software, and we expect this process to go on for years to come.

What is your business strategy with the CBS SportsLine online community?

BINENSTOCK: The contributors who come to CBS SportsLine are seeking like-minded fans and expertise, and because Fantasy sports is so much a part of the CBS SportsLine experience, there is a vast and largely untapped well of insight and aggregated learning that our community possesses.

Our strategy is to bubble that expertise and those capabilities to the top of the site -- to make our audience apparent. The Reputation System helps us do that.

At any time, you can visit the Community Home page to see which of the top members are online, which threads are "hottest" or which have come from top members.

This makes it easier for both anonymous and registered members to quickly pick out what's hot, what's new, who's of interest, who to believe and who to discount.

Ultimately, we want to create enough really good contributors and really excellent content to draw more and more of the best sports experts on the web to the CBS forum.

Can you summarize why you think that the CBS SportsLine communities are a success?

BINENSTOCK: Let me begin by talking about the Fantasy sports community in particular, because that community has been a key driver of the CBS SportsLine economic engine for a long time.

If a product meets a need and friends feel compelled to tell friends about it, it's likely the product will thrive. That was the case for CBS SportsLine's Fantasy community.

Our community formed around our software and then the community itself exerted control over it. They did this by providing their feedback which was impassioned and frequent. Their input influenced each subsequent iteration and enhancement of the software.

Over time, the software and the communities evolved together.

Similarly, by building the Reputation System into our more general communities, we expect an evolution that yields something more than just software.

What we'll get is an interaction that iterates to specific value-creation for the audience that exists now, as well as the audiences yet to come.

What makes our System a success is this inherent capability to evolve: both in terms of satisfying our audience and in meeting our business objectives.

The way we measure that success in the immediate is via engagement: specifically, minutes of consumption. With so many competing priorities for today's audience, we've focused on how much time consumers spend with our products as a proxy for satisfaction.

We've seen that number grow with time, but as you might expect, we think there's ample room for improvement.

Obviously, this doesn't mean creating time traps where we make it hard for folks to find what they want in order to artificially inflate one business metric.

Engagement minutes must be considered along side goals for increased visits and expanding reach. We look at these as well to get a holistic picture of the system's vital signs.

Another important measurement that we're not monitoring right now is the ability to assess our progress with product improvements. There will have to be metrics that speak to the number of user-generated-enhancements that successfully make their way into the product and the speed in which they get there.

We've got the good fortune of having a large audience. It's now incumbent on us to listen to them.

What are some key lessons learned during and after the tech crash
of 00-01? How does the resurgence of interest in online community
impact your strategy moving forward?

BINENSTOCK: I suppose the implication of the question is that in the tech crash many people jumped on the "internet" bandwagon with no clear concept of what they wanted to achieve and only poorly constructed plans for how to achieve it.

So, I suppose the argument here is that when people talk about web 2.0 or social networking, there is a level of suspicion that they're engaging in similarly frivolous behavior to that of the late 90's.

There's a difference here. Social networking has community, but community is not social networking.

CBS is not a social network. We are a media company with vast resources to attract, entertain and distinguish communities.

Certainly, people who approach community with a "me too, social networking is cool" attitude are probably doomed to fail. Community is not something that one can apply or exert. The communities themselves have too much power and too many choices, so you must provide members value for their contributions and their time.

In our case, as a media company we always want the community and the discussion to have context, even if that context ultimately gets modified or rejected by the community.

If the community produces the kind of excellent content it's capable of, the kind we think our Reputation System encourages, CBS also possesses the unique capability to bring all of the assets of a company of its size to bear in order to highlight such creations.

That's the kind of value contributors can recognize and embrace.

Can you talk a bit about how the CBS SportsLine online community helps add value to the CBS brand?

BINENSTOCK: There is a little bit of chicken-and-egg going on here.

The suggestion is that a vibrant and highly regarded community provides a significant impact to the CBS brand, but I also think that the CBS brand helps us build that valuable community.

I believe most people would say that the CBS brand stands for high quality entertainment and conveys honesty, trust, stability, social change and justice.

In news programs such as Edward R. Murrow's "See it Now", or Don Hewitt's "60 Minutes" as well as in programs such as "All in the Family" or "M*A*S*H", there has been a long-standing tradition at CBS of urging change, raising awareness and encouraging debate.

These characteristics are important to someone considering interaction with a community.

For many of us, the CBS Sports brand holds a similar kind of aspirational symbolism -- one of high quality and excellence.

It's as though the greatness exhibited by the athletes has also informed the broadcast and the brand itself, so for many, CBS Sports denotes excellence.

If things evolve as intended, community members with affinities for the qualities that CBS and CBS Sports represent will gravitate to us. Our System will then discover and highlight the best contributions and the best contributors.

So, my expectation is that this relationship will have an ongoing and evolutionary influence over the CBS audience and the CBS brand.

What key trends are you paying attention to with regard to your
online audience?

BINENSTOCK: Cross-platform capabilities are high among them. Giving members access to their information via phones or set-top boxes will be of greater and greater importance as technologies evolve.

Cross-site portability is also important. Capabilities to have access and control or to share one’s creations and interactions on other sites or with one's friends will become more and more important.

Finally, I'd say personalization of experience has always been a hallmark of what CBS SportsLine has done, but there's ample room to improve and provide our audience even greater control and a more direct impact over their experiences with us.

What are the biggest challenges you face in building and running
the CBS SportsLine community?

BINENSTOCK: Competing priorities is probably at the top of my list. The good news about our industry and our space is that there are so many incredibly cool things to do and so much innovation taking place. The bad news about our industry and our space is that there are so many incredibly cool ….

As I said earlier, we get valuable feedback from our community, and using that feedback will be the key to our success. We now need the time to make the changes they've called for.

Once we do, I expect to see the same kind of exponential ramp-up we saw with our Fantasy sports communities.

When members are happy with their experiences and proud of their creations, they bring their friends and families with them.

The Online Community Expert Interview is a monthly series that features Online Community thought leaders driving online community strategy and practice at their organizations. This month's interview features Scott Moore from the Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation

Scott has been establishing and fostering online communities since 1995. Starting at the avatar-based virtual world , WorldsAway (now VZones", he supervised the volunteer community support group, designed new spaces and oversaw the virtual economy. At Communities.com he supported live events and fostered community spaces for commercial media clients. He also consulted with a variety of community-oriented companies including blaxxun and There. Since 2001, he has helped parents of kids with learning and attention problems connect and offer each other mutual support and inspiration by joining social techniques and technical tools to foster a tolerant, insightful and advocating community of parents with diverse experience and needs.


You've been working in the online community space for a number of years. What major online community and collaboration trends have you seen at your company?

At the foundation where I work, the main focus has been providing reliable research-based information to parents with social tools to foster a mutual support. The direction we have been trending is letting the community influence and inform our work in deeper ways: initially, this was through setting community policies, then recognizing the knowledge community members exhibit, then using select community members to write articles, or participate as guest experts. Along the way, we have also involved members earlier and earlier in the design process. This has been a benefit for everyone involved. Most recently, the community, when presented with a new feature at the conceptual phase, reminded me to "not make a big production of it". Following this advice, the final result was not only simpler to use, but required less effort for us to implement and was released much sooner than we hoped. I am looking forward to expanding the notion of who is in "the community" and letting their voices have a deeper influence.

What hasn't worked in the past is overestimating the community's needs up front. Keep things simple and let your community tell you what they want. They will tell you their needs, either they already know them or they discover new needs as they exchange ideas with others. Participation programs, technical tools or features that do not have an impact on helping your community benefit from being in the community should take a lower priority. When a need is clearly identified by the community, give it the priority it deserves (lots).


Do you have examples of a few major corporations / sites doing interesting things with online communities? Who are you paying attention to?

Since I started working with online communities as virtual worlds, I was introduced early to what the massively multiplayer online games (MMO) do to encourage interaction and participation. Games and other forms of play are inherently a social interaction so I tend to keep an eye on how these have been evolving over the years. MMO developers have proven willing to experiment with their player communities in ways other online services have not -- reputation systems, content, adding and even removing features, virtual market spaces and currencies. In addition to the well known companies such as Sony (EverQuest), Blizzard (Worlds of Warcraft), and Linden Labs (SecondLife), there are smaller companies that are doing interesting things. One of my favorite examples is Three Rings and their Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates game. It's a great example of grouping people together, giving them a goal and dividing the "work" needed to achieve that goal into small individual parts that are fun to do.

It hasn't been until recently that we have been seeing similar examples of engaging, fun interfaces that are not afraid to upset the people using them and having the flexibility to continuously tweak. Now, some game developers such as Raph Koster are pointing out what game companies can learn from rising Web 2.0 companies as well as vice versa. (link to Raph's Etech07 and Web2.0 sessions)


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

This round of renewed focus on using online communities is paying more attention on the benefits community members have by interacting with each other. Regardless which definition of ROI you want to use (return on investment, information or interaction), I am hearing more and more community managers who are focusing on helping community members increase their return as a main goal. This doesn't mean that the organization hosting the community gives up on return, but that it's not the only bottom line (and it's not just a monetary bottom line). The idea is that my bottom line is helping you increase your bottom line.


What should every CEO know about online communities?

Communities are made of people! I know that is said over and over, but it bears repeating because it is often forgotten as organizations focus on the details. Because the small details ripple through groups of people, how they behave and interact, this can cause organizations to stray away from supporting people.

The way to counter this tendency (aside from listening to what your internal community evangelists tell you) is to consider communities as trusting relationships. All the other definitions of what a community is, communication, time spent, location, shared resources or any exchange among members ultimately come down to relationships between people. What we do to keep relationships going with our spouses, children, extended family, lovers, friends carry over to what your organization can to do. Everyday think, "What can I do to have a trusting relationship with these person tomorrow?"

The Online Community Expert Interview is a monthly series that features Online Community thought leaders driving online community strategy and practice at their companies. This month's interview features Lee LeFever from Common Craft.

Lee has designed, built and managed online community websites since 1999, when he founded the online community program at Solucient, LLC (a healthcare data company). In 2003 he founded Common Craft, LLC, a consulting company that specializes in Social Design for the Web (www.commoncraft.com ) . Lee was the social designer for the March of Dimes Share Your Story Online Community in 2005 (www.shareyourstory.org) and has worked on community initiatives with Boeing, Microsoft and Geffen Records among others.

You've been working in the online community space for a number of years. What major online community and collaboration trends have you seen at your company? What are you advising your clients now?

Two big things come to mind:

1) In terms of overall trends, community is a big focus in the business world - and it feels real this time. When I started working with customer communities in 1999 I spent a lot of time describing the concept and evangelizing. There was a lot of misunderstanding, doubt and nay saying. When the bubble burst it added fuel to the fire. In the last couple of years, the tools have improved, there are many exciting new models and success stories and your average Internet user has a renewed, more positive perception of community. While there is still misunderstanding, it's exciting to see renewed focus and attention in the community space. Already this year there were two well-attended conferences focusing on community (CommunityNext and Community 2.0).

2) In my experience, there is a much needed focus on the role of the community manager. Companies are starting to understand that community isn't a technology that you plug in and leave alone - it's a way of doing business that takes time and hard work. In the best success stories, there is almost always a person or small group that understands community processes, sets expectations, and balances the needs of the community and the organization. Community management is an important skill we need to develop more in the future.

Do you have examples of a few major corporations / sites doing interesting things with online communities? Who are you paying attention to?

I've been really interested in Dell's Ideastorm. I'm hearing frustration from companies that relates to filtering community "noise" into actionable and valuable data. While Ideastorm may not be a traditional community, it is an interesting experiment in enabling members to propose/promote/demote the ideas that they value the most. Of course, the onus is clearly on Dell to close the loop and react to these suggestions in a balanced way as they did recently in agreeing to ship the Linux operating system.
Another example is Ducati Motorcycles who recently moved away from a traditional marketing department in favor of working with a customer community. The quote I've seen is that the community is at the"center" of the organization's structure. At Common Craft, we're currently working with Microsoft on community-based support and I've been really impressed with their level of commitment and focus on community as a part of their future business.

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

I'm excited about the evolution in modes of community participation. In the past, "community" was often enabled through a message board, email list, newsgroup, etc. While these are all very useful and popular today, they are now part of a much broader set of features that enable member participation in a community. Let's face it, discussion is intimidating online and off. We can now offer members a number of ways to participate that don't have the social pressure of a discussion (but may offer a gateway to discussion).
One way to look at this is through what I call "community currency". In this case, currency means the basic unit of exchange between members. It may be discussion, or it may be photos, videos, friend lists, social bookmarks, ideas, how-tos etc. These form the foundation of exchange and a chance for trust to develop as a community gets started. Another example is the ability for members to take small actions that enable the community to be better organized or more dynamic. Examples included adding tags to content, ratings, reporting spam, bookmarking, adding friends, joining/creating groups, etc. All of these concepts are part of re-thinking what community participation really means.

What should every CEO know about online communities?

I founded Common Craft because I'm convinced that online communities will represent a competitive advantage for organizations in the future. In my version of the future, the company with the most engaged and productive community of customers wins. It's hard work to really engage customers in this way, but once the relationship is there, the potential impact on innovation, anticipation of change, product development, marketing, etc. is huge and becomes a differentiator in the market. An online community is an invitation to get these new kinds of relationships started.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shawn's Bio:
I currently manage a product development team at the Louisville office of CNET Networks. I have been with CNET since 1999. In my current role, I manage all of the product development functions for TechRepublic.com.

I have been working on the web professionally since 1997. I have completed large-scale design, production and/or usability projects for clients including Philips, Office Depot, Best Western Hotels and Kemper Insurance.

I have written over a dozen articles on web development for CNET's Builder.com and have appeared on NPR’s "State of Affairs" to discuss blogging.


Q: Shawn, You've been working in the online community space for a number of years. What major online community and collaboration trends have you seen at your company? What are you doing now, and mostly importantly, what's working?


A: Wow, I think I’ve seen just about all of trends at some point over the past 8 years - from collaborative desktop apps, to discussion boards, to blogs, to wikis to social news.

In fact, a couple of years ago, TechRepublic pushed out a lot of new features like social bookmarking, member blogs and wikis with the goal of driving increased usage within the community.

In the end, we found that what our members really wanted was for us to focus on improving the features they used the most – discussion and technical Q&A. The big lesson from that exercise was to follow the needs of the community first, not the latest new thing that analysts, journalists or bloggers are raving about… unless your community is geared toward analysts, journalists or bloggers.

We also learned that it’s OK to phase out features if they’re not working. In my experience, you need to continuously justify every feature on the site. If something isn’t getting used, it is noise and the more noise you have, the harder it is to clearly articulate your value proposition.



Q: Do you have examples of a few major corporations / sites doing interesting things with online communities? Who are you paying attention to?

I am always trying new services in an effort to stay up-to-date on emerging trends. I’ve probably signed up for 50 or more services over the past couple of years, which I’ll admit is a bit excessive; however, it helps me understand what is possible. Often, it is small things like the registration form on another service that can inspire you to improve your own processes.

In terms of specific sites that I am paying attention to, three sites come to mind immediately: twitter, iLike and CoComment.

I am fascinated with twitter (and a similar site Jaiku) because it is interesting to think about what you can do with this idea of “presence.” Are people really interested in telling their friends what they are doing right at this moment? Obviously, some people are. And since these services can also be used with a mobile phone, the growth opportunities are pretty huge.

Sites such as iLike and CoComment are intriguing because they are building or enhancing community experiences around things that people are doing elsewhere.

iLike takes data from the things you listen to on iTunes and helps you find other people with similar musical tastes as well as other bands that are similar to the bands you listen to. I use it all the time and love how the service gets better as I listen to more music (something I was doing already).

CoComment is similar in that it is taking all of the comments that you post all across the web and bringing them together in a single place. So if you post comments on blogs, on Flickr, in discussion boards or whatever, you can use CoComment to see all of your posts and any follow-up posts from other uses. And because it uses a browser plugin (similar to how iLike uses an iTunes plugin), it happens automatically.

I think services that are able to take things you are already doing and make a new, rich experience out of it are very interesting and I hope to see more of them.


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

A: I don’t really think of community as a growth area for most sites. People may disagree; however, when you consider that only 1% of people actually participate on the web, it is unrealistic to expect that adding “community” to a site is going to drive huge growth.

Of course, people often want to label the consumption or reading of message boards and forums as “community,” but that’s a stretch in my opinion. I think of community as a group of people who connect online and share information with each other.

I’m sure lots of people will disagree with my definition of community and lump in the “lurkers” or consumers of community content. In that case, depending on what topic your community is focused on, you could see significant growth in page views and unique users who come into your community from search engines. However, those users tend to be lower value because they are looking for a data transaction (they need a specific answer right now), not a community to be a part of. That’s why I don’t like to include them as part of the community.

Q: How do community managers make the ROI case to senior management?

A: I think it depends on how you define community. If you use a more pure definition of community, as I mentioned before, I see community as primarily a loyalty and retention tool