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

In my last post, “Want to Know What Community Members Need? Just Ask” I discussed the importance of asking your members what they need from you as a community host, and what they need from other community members, as part of your extended community.

In this post, I will discuss the methodology for conducting a discovery exercise of the relevant parts of the social web to find out where your community (or potential community) is already working and playing. .

Most community strategies have traditionally focused 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 off-domain. An ecosystem research exercise should be conducting as part of a strategy development (or strategy course correction) exercise in order to discover where the off domain centers or activity are, and who the most vocal and active participants are. The discovery exercise is essentially 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.

What Should You Look For?
The purpose of this discovery exercise is to look for existing signs of life for your community “off domain”. Signs of life include conversations about your company, product, or issues related to your particular market or issue area. What should you specifically search for as part of your discovery process? The following list is a jumping off point for starting your discovery process:

• Mentions of company name
• Mentions of brand or product names
• Issues related to you market
• Topics related to your market
• Mentions of key employees
• Advocates or spokespeople
• Mentions of competitors

Where Should You Look?
Using tools like Google Blog Search, Twitter Search, Delicious, and Ice Rocket, conduct searches for brand mentions in news, the mass social media sphere (blogs, twitter) 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, Ning, LinkedIn, Get 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.

Key Sites:

Outputs of the Ecosystem Audit
Insights that will likely emerge from your ecosystem audit include:

• Key news sites
• List of most active members (potential community members)
• List of influential users (potential community members)
• Thought leaders (personalities shaping your industry)
• List of active groups (potential partner communities)
• Independent community sites (potential partner communities)
• Key blogs (Niche bloggers and group blogs)
• In-person meetups and events (you might consider participating)
• A list of spaces where your community *isn’t* (helpful in prioritizing where to participate)

One helpful by-product of conducting an ecosystem audit is the set of fundamental elements for an ongoing listening strategy: search terms, topics and relevant online sources. The ecosystem audit process forces a team to experiment with and refine search terms and topics in order to discover content sources. Many of the tools mentioned above support RSS feeds with near real-time results. So, wether you use a simple tool, like google reader for your listening strategy, or something more industrial strength like a Radian6 or Scoutlabs, you have completed a lot of the prerequisite work for ongoing listening and monitoring.

In the next two upcoming posts “Designing an Online Presence Architecture” and “Engagement Planning” I will describe how to take the inputs of goal definition, member research and the ecosystem audit to create an Online Presence Architecture and to develop an engagement plan.

Recommended Reading:
Participating in the Social Media Ecosystem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A list of likely internal stakeholders includes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Topics
The topics, which generally follow my strategy development process, will be:
Update 2/17/10: I will link to the completed posts from here, so feel free to use this as an index.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Again, I would *LOVE* your feedback on the topics above. My goals is to write an article a week over the next 12-14 weeks. Update 2/17/10: My optimism here now seems laughable Realistically, this series will span the next 2-3 months. Each article will be labeled “Back to Basics”, and will be tagged #ocb2b