Organizations from Starbucks to the White House have used “ideas sites” to capture, tag, rank and broadcast ideas from constituents. To learn more about this sector, we caught up with Rob Hoehn, President of Customer Development at IdeaScale, an ideas management platform. Here are his comments:

1) What is IdeaScale? How do you describe the sector you are in?

We have been building online market research tools since 2003. Throughout this time, we’ve found that traditional online research methods were not effective in fostering a sense of community among customers. In addition, we found that our client’s customers are talking about their organization all over the social web (Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, etc.) Our goal is to help channel these discussions to both increase engagement and provide focused, effective feedback for your organization.

IdeaScale is used by all types of organizations ranging from government agencies to non-profits to companies of all sizes. Some of the worlds most recognizable brands such as Xerox, RedHat, Microsoft, the Veterans Administration, and even The White House have used IdeaScale as their crowdsourcing platform. Our parent company, Survey Analytics, has made Inc. magazine’s list of the fastest-growing private companies, ranking 172nd overall and 25th among business-service providers. Puget Sound Business Journal recognized Survey Analytics as one of the 50 fastest-growing private companies in Washington State.

2) What are the three or four main motivations a company or non-profit has for using an idea management platform?

1) Increase employee (or customer) engagement.
2) Sense of involvement/ownership.
3) Build a sense of community around a specific idea.

3) I see a number of federal agencies just launched feedback sites on your platform. It looks like information is rolled up here: http://opengovtracker.com/. What is this initiative trying to achieve?

OpenGovTracker was built during the big snow storm in DC last winter by two developers with a lot of time on their hands . They were aware of our API, and were able to use it to build a very helpful dashboard. They key lesson is platform and APIs – there are just some things you’ll never dream up on your own. The only viable approach is to build a rich set of APIs and plugins to allow anyone to mashup the data to build cool and interesting applications. We’ll seeing the same type of response from our iPhone plugin – an application that we recently open sourced for our user community.

4) What common pitfalls are you seeing as clients turn to idea management platforms?

I see several issues:

Properly Assigned Moderators: Since the initial setup/configuration of these community tools can be slightly technical, there tends to be situations where this same person ends up moderating the community. In reality, this role is best suited for a marketing or PR person within any organization. We see many of the same people that are setting up and configuring the sites end up moderating hundreds of ideas a day.

Clear Terms of Services and Rules of Participation: Also, we see a lot of folks failing to define a set of moderation guidelines for their community members. A clear set of terms of service as well a defined moderation policies goes a long way in clarifying to your users what they can expect from you and vice versa.

Don’t Be Afraid: Many folks are deathly afraid of publicly talking to their customers. You’ll soon learn, however, that the people that take the time to leave you feedback about your organization can end up becoming some of your best customers.

5) Matthew Lees’ latest report on crowdsourcing and ideas sites talks a lot about management. How hard are ideas sites to manage?

Not hard at all! For example, our flagging functionality allows you to leverage your own crowd to help control inappropriate or foul language. So for example, if a user sees a comment that she thinks doesn’t belong on the site, she can click a link to flag the item. This will then remove the comment from your community and drop it into a queue for a moderator to review.

6) Any other words of advice for people learning about this sector?

Moderate early and often. The first few hours/minutes after your community goes live is most important. If a user sees a bunch of inappropriate ideas or comments, your site may not be taken very seriously. A very common practice is to “Seed” the community with a bunch of pre-writtem poems.

Cross-posted on the Good Ideas Blog.

Cross-posted from the Good Ideas Blog:
We are in an era of “Government 2.0″ enthusiasm. The Obama Administration, as well as state and local governments, are working hard to move information and services online. But as agencies and departments implement new web and social media programs, they run into a number of structural and legislative obstacles.

To sort through these challenges, we asked for the views of Fred Smith, a Senior Technologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who oversees many new media efforts. The CDC is always included on the short list of US government agencies using social media in innovative ways.

Here are five of Fred’s good ideas for effective social media programs in government:

1) Take Risks

New media are new. We all are experimenting to some extent. This means accepting some risk in social media efforts, and also tolerating some degree of failure. Senior management and staff need to understand the risk profile of social media efforts. (As a related note, Amazon reportedly includes “risk-taking” in their performance reviews.)

2) Realistic Evaluations

It is important to evaluate social media efforts, and particularly to understand which channels are best for reaching which audiences with which messages. Performance reporting will improve efforts. That said, it is necessary to be realistic about how precise communications evaluations can be (e.g. nobody ever asks “how effective was that brochure?” — they ask “how effective was our campaign?”).

3) In Government, Identify and Update Social Media-Challenging Policies

Many government policies were written before social media (or even the internet). They now can create obstacles. For example, as part of the “Paperwork Reduction Act”, the OMB is required to approve any program that asks questions of the public. Should that include, for example, voting up an idea on a social media site? This law, as well as laws and policies dealing with terms of service, tracking technologies, privacy issues, and others topics are being updated.

4) Promote Open Source

Government should use and contribute to open source initiatives. Unfortunately there are many terms of service, liability and other issues which hinder government participation. These obstacles are (slowly) being addressed. When government agencies can’t turn to open source, they should at least investigate offering their data and content
through open APIs.

5) Coordinate Security and Social Media Efforts

IT security staff and social media staff have very different – and typically conflicting – approaches to the web. It is important that they work together. At the CDC the security and social media teams meet monthly to work out any issues, and (importantly) to describe what is on the horizon in order to identify potential challenges.

Please feel free to vote or comment on these or other ideas – or add your own – on Good Ideas.

Cross-posted from the Good Ideas Blog:

David Witzel has spent a lot of time thinking about online collaborative approaches to solving social issues. He co-founded (with me) Forum One, a web development group which works on topics of social importance; he ran the Live Interviews Online series involving policymakers; and he now directs the Innovation Exchange at the Environmental Defense Fund. We asked his thoughts on interesting ideas for new approaches to social challenges. Here are five:

1) Develop a Shared Infrastructure for Local Budget Decisions

Every town in the US (the world?) will have problems budgeting for years to come. But figuring out what to do about budgets is tricky. An infrastructure that would support collaborative decision-making could improve both decision-making & buy-in. The infrastructure will provide historical data about the town budget as well as comparative data across towns. It will help facilitate contributions to data collection, data analysis, and preference identification. All we need is someone to build it.

2) A Global Infrastructure for a Sustainable Economy

Let’s create an infrastructure that supports a sustainable economy like the internet is an infrastructure that supports information & collaboration. What does the “sustainability stack” look like? What open source tools and standards do we need to make all businesses perform more sustainably?

3) The Sustainability Consortium

A group of academics, businesses, and non-profits working together to figure out how to define “sustainability” in our economy is an idea with real legs. Their mission is “work collaboratively to build a scientific foundation that drives innovation to improve consumer product sustainability.” The sustainability consortium was initiated by Walmart and is coordinated by Arizona State U and U of Arkansas. Safeway and L’Oreal are 2 recent members. http://www.sustainabilityconsortium.org/

4) Open Source to Promote Health Data Exchange

(The federal government, no less) creating an open source project to promote electronic health data exchange is a great idea. Building a community around the project is one of the ways to make it not only a good idea, but one that works. http://www.connectopensource.org/about/what-is-CONNECT

5) Volunteer-Driven Local News Services

Call it citizen journalism, collaborative journalism, user generated content, or try to deprecate it by calling it “blogging” – organizing volunteer-driven, collaborative, news collection and sharing in local communities is a great and doable idea. The software and infrastructure are inexpensive (e.g., wordpress on a cloud server) and easy enough to use that loosely knit groups of volunteers can do amazing thing. The Falls Church Times has managed over 1000 posts since it launched and is attracting growing numbers of readers and contributors. http://fallschurchtimes.com/

You can vote for and comment on these (and other) ideas on Good Ideas.

This month’s Online Community Expert interview is with Jordan Williams, Manager of Digital Engagement at REI. In this role, Jordan is responsible for creating deeper customer engagement through the creation of content and community touch points on REI.com and throughout the social web.

Though firmly planted in the digital world, Jordan is a believer in well-roundedness and previously led REI’s national advertising and marketing strategic planning programs. Prior to REI he was Director of Collegiate Marketing at Red Bull North America and worked on the agency side creating experiential marketing programs for clients such as Sony Music, Mercedes Benz, Wells Fargo and American Express. Finally as a holder of a fine arts degree from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts he’d like to offer the perspective that marketing is pretty much just theater with better analytics.

Q: What excites you most about your role at REI?

What excites me most about my role at REI is two-fold:

First and foremost it’s the delight and challenge organizationally of helping to move a venerable 70-year old co-op forward in the digital age, especially into increasingly social spaces online. I find that we, like most large brands outside the tech world, are experiencing the strategic and operational challenges of transforming from a push-marketing organization to one embracing a truly customer-centric, two-way marketing and communication model – as many of us have surely experienced: it’s one thing to sign off on the concepts or strategies that drive social media success, but another thing to embrace them at their fundamental core on a day-to-day basis.

Secondly, as a mission driven retail co-op focused on getting people outside it’s exciting to be working on online community because it’s such a natural fit. We’ve been a member-based organization from the day we were founded, we have retail locations around the country where members gather and connect, and we have an extensive outreach program connecting with hundreds of local non-profits, etc. Indeed our troubles are rarely about building a sustainable social media strategy from the ground up, but rather building one that can connect the multitude of connection points, interactions, and content pools we already have in place in the real world.

Q: As a Co-Op, REI already has a passionate and active offline member community. How has the existing community factored in to your online community and social media strategy?

Well you’ve hit the nail on the head as for us it’s really about how we build on the community we already have in place. We want to honor what’s already there while at the same time enable online and mobile connections that will allow it to grow organically and for us that means being able to take a more long term approach. As we’re already supporting our members desire to connect via all of our traditional retail events, classes, outings, etc, on the digital side of things we’re in the enviable place of being able to work on building lasting and meaningful online interactions rather than feeling pressured simply to launch something quickly because of it’s the hot trend right now.

Q. What is the most valuable external (off domain) online community or social media touch point for REI that provides clear and compelling value to both your customer and REI?

We’ve been finding that Facebook is our most valuable external social touch point. The nature of how we want to connect and share with our fans/followers, and they with one another, largely means being more interactive and multimedia that say Twitter might allow. That said we certainly see the opportunity for crafting increasingly platform specific interactions, for example as a retailer we’re certainly aware of the success that Dell has had with their Twitter specific sales strategy.

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

For me I see how easy it is to get caught up in the exciting side of the business, e.g. the technology, the platform, the shiny, bleeding edge new feature. But from my experience the way to make an impact is absolutely on the strategic planning and organizational development side of things. It’s not sexy and it’s certainly not easy, but ultimately the real impact if you work on the brand side is found through fundamental organizational transformation.

As an added bonus, I was able to spend a few minutes with Jordan at the Online Community Summit in Sonoma last fall. The video below is from our conversation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Again, Rawn’s book “Social Networking for Business” is available at Amazon and other booksellers.

This month we’re featuring two video interviews Bill Johnston conducted at the Online Community Summit in Sonoma, CA in October.

In the first interview, Bill Johnston talks with Vida Killian of Dell about the value of online community at Dell as well as lessons learned from her experience with community and social media.

In Bill’s second interview with Mari Kuraishi of GlobalGiving.org, Mari share’s how GlobalGiving uses online community and social media strategy for global good.

This week’s Online Community Expert Interview is with Angela Connor is a multimedia journalist and community manager with a passion for online communities and social media. She is the Managing Editor of User-Generated Content at WRAL.com where she launched and currently manages the top-rated news organization’s first online community GOLO.com, which has grown to more than 13,000 members. Angela has worked in broadcast, print and online news in Cleveland, Tampa, West Palm Beach and Ft. Lauderdale and is author of the book, 18 rules of Community Engagement.

Q: Tell me a little about how you became a Community Manager. What attracted you to the role?

Actually, it fell in my lap in many ways. I was working as the Multimedia Editor at a newspaper in South Florida when my former boss and good friend contacted me about the position. He thought it would be a good move for me based on my relationship building experience as a news manager and producer and wanted to know if he could recommend me. I was heavily involved in the online video strategy for the newspaper and managing our broadcast partnerships and pretty content in my position at the time so it felt like it would be an unwelcome disruption to my life, but it turned out to be the best move I could have ever made. When I started researching what the job was all about, I told him to go ahead and submit my name. I was attracted to the fact that it was a startup and I had never been involved in a brand new online initiative. I was also attracted and intrigued by the UGC aspect because it was a term being heavily circulated in the online publishing industry and I knew that meant something big. His advice to me was to go try it out because even mild success would chart a new career path for me. I wasn’t convinced, but once I started talking to the folks at the TV station and saw how committed they were to the community they serve I knew it would be a good fit.

Q: What were the most challenging lessons you learned during your first 90 days on the job?

I am now well over two years in the job and I continue to learn new things, and new challenges emerge pretty much weekly. But I have to say that in the first 90 days I realized that there was no guide book on how to do this and that trial and error was a major part of finding success. So I would say that coming to terms with that was a bit tough, especially since I have always known how to do my job and do it well. This was new territory because there are so many aspects of community management that you simply do not control. I wanted to see membership take off, and by many standards it did but I wanted it to happen more quickly. It’s very challenging to sit back and wait for others to act. You are depending on people to make your project a success and they are not on your payroll. It requires a different mindset. Once I really understood that, I was able to chart a course of action.

Q: What excites you the most about your job?

I am excited about the fact that I am doing something that continues to gain popularity and is increasingly gaining value across all industries. How many times do you really get to say that you were involved in something at the ground floor? I feel like I am, and that’s pretty exciting. I like being able to try something and see what happens without worrying about long-term repercussions. If it doesn’t work I can just try something new. It’s also very exciting to teach others both inside and outside of my organization about the value of online communities through real life stories that take shape right before me. Watching relationships emerge online as a result of a venue you provide, manage and maintain is very fulfilling.

Q: What 3 pieces of advice would you give to those considering Community Management as a career?

1. You must have a thick skin. If you cannot walk away from derisive comments and constant, sometimes unwarranted criticism, you cannot do this job in the way it needs to be done.

2. Study the craft. It is important to learn from others and pay close attention to the developments in this space.

3. Be prepared for change. This is a position that means different things within different organizations and your responsibilities may ebb and flow.

Q: How do you see the Community Manager role evolving over the next 12-18 months? What trends should CMs be paying attention to?

This may not be a popular train of thought, but I think there is a distinct difference in community management geared towards the mainstream social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and blogs, and the management of those that are owned by a specific organization or what some would refer to as branded communities. Right now it seems as though everyone is lumping it all together and that could be because the position is hot and top brass at organizations don’t really know how to label much of what they are asking people to do, particularly with social media related positions. For instance, is someone who is responsible for monitoring twitter a community manager? I guess the first question to answer there would be if twitter is even a community. It certainly isn’t one that any of us owns and if for some reason it’s gone tomorrow many people would be in big, big trouble. But that’s a conversation for a different day. Is the person who maintains a Facebook fan page or YouTube Channel a Community Manager? Could they transfer what they’re doing in that space to a less mainstream or new community and grow it from scratch? That’s where you get down and dirty and go through all the frustrations that make you better or make you realize that this isn’t the craft for you. I think we are mistakenly confusing social media savvy with the ability to manage online communities. I think we will see more of that in the next 12-18 months and beyond. And that’s a mistake. Community managers should pay attention to technology trends and if you are one responsible for engaging in the mainstream platforms you have to pay attention to what is happening with each and every one. Pay attention to every move made by Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and beyond and find smart people who provide good analysis and interpret those moves.

This week’s first Online Community Expert Interview is with Chia Hwu. Chia, a former organic chemist who is happy to be out of the lab after a ten-year stint in front of a bench, is the Community Manager at 23andMe. She has worked in biotech and tech, been a volunteer coordinator and online community manager at various start-ups. Her twitter handle is @chiah and her new blog is at http://socialmediamarketing.typepad.com.

Q: Chia, you have a very unique community, in the sense that your community has the ability explore issues relating to a person’s DNA. Can you talk about the strategy behind the 23andMe community?

23andMe has a very unique community that is based on having your genetic data. We currently only allow members who have been genotyped or have an Ancestry account post to the forums and the level of discourse is extremely high. We are very lucky to have such engaged, passionate and well-educated users who want to talk about their genetic results and share their data with each other. If you are interested in seeing what types of discussions are happening, create a free account and you can read through the threads.

Our community creates a place for people to engage with each other, it’s pretty interesting to see how the interactions happen and how people connect, sometimes through their data and sometimes just in conversation.

Q: Since you have such a unique data set and identifier for each member, can you talk about the unusual challenges and opportunities your community faces?

We do have some very unique and personal data about each member of our community but DNA data is kept separate from the personally identifying data in our system. Unless you decide to “share” DNA data with others (a process similar to friending on Facebook, but you are sharing your genetic profiles), there is no way to see your genetic information from looking at the Profile page. Posting on our community does not imply “sharing” any genetic data, it’s a forum.

One of the unique challenges that our community members face is deciding whether they want to “share” their genetic data with other members who have similar interests in ancestry or health topics. And if they decide to “share”, they have to decide whether to do it at the Basic level (ancestry and aggregate data) or at the Extended level (detailed health risks).

Q: What have the 2-3 most interesting (and surprising) uses of the community that you have encountered?

I have been very surprised that people have been sharing genetic information with strangers, not just a handful but sometimes by the hundreds.

The second thing that has been great (and at times also a challenge) is that people are very passionate about our service. It is surprising to me how much people care about what new features we develop and how attached our members are to a community that is less than a year old.

Q: How are you reaching beyond the hosted 23andMe community to maintain on online presence?

To reach the online audience I use Twitter, Facebook, DNA-ancestry sites and email lists to maintain a 23andMe presence. These are all tools though, to build relationships. I also go to a lot of events to connect with people, especially people in the Health 2.0 and social media space. No matter what, the online communications tools does not entirely take the place of building in person relationships.

Q: What excites you most about your job?

The best part of my job as Community Manager is getting to know people. My favorite part is when I am able to help answer questions and solve problems. I like being the internal champion of our members, sort of like being a user voice.

This week’s second Online Community Expert Interview is with Ron Casalotti. Ron is a Social Media guy who got his first PC in 1994. It came with free trial memberships to the online services of the day: AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy, Genie and ImagiNation Network. He joined them all, dropping each as their trial period ended — except for AOL. Why? It had the best online “community”. Ron started participating in online activities with other members there and three years later AOL hired him. He’s been hooked ever since. After 10 years at AOL, all in Community, where he was involved in everything from creating online content to setting up an offshore moderation team, he joined BusinessWeek as Director of User Participation where he is responsible for curating community centered around the Business Exchange social media information site including user outreach; content approval and community moderation.

Q: Can you tell us a bit about the strategy behind BusinessWeek’s Business Exchange? What are you trying to accomplish?

Start with the tenet that in business, as elsewhere, knowledge equals power, and emphasize that relevance is vital. Acknowledge the fact that important information is not limited to any one site (or even one’s own site of reputable and knowledgeable writers and editors). Recognize that there is no more precious resource to a business person than time. And then inject the formidable power of social media to amplify and organize all of these factors. That’s my recipe for BusinessWeek’s Business Exchange.

People ask me, “Is Business Exchange a content aggregator or a social network?” My answer is, “Yes.” Certainly, Business Exchange (”BX”) is a site that aggregates business information in the form of articles, blog posts, reference items and jobs organized by topic. But, we do not impose our idea of what those topics should be our users suggest business oriented topics (currently 1,600+) that are of interest to them thereby creating a topic folksonomy. We also do not limit content found in BX from just BusinessWeek related sites. Any relevant content (even our competitors’) is welcomed and included.

But BX is at its heart a social media platform where people “vote with their clicks” on content that they find most important, displaying those items in a ranked Most Active list. This crowd sourced vetting of the most valuable content within a topic helps our users save time when trying to identify the most valuable information on each topic. And a professional profile on Business Exchange is highly ranked by Google further enhancing our users’ online personae. And so Business Exchange is a useful tool to the business professional, reinforcing providing information and engagement well beyond that of other business oriented sites that

BusinessWeek magazine has been around for 80 years and launched its online presence in 1994 with a traditional Web 1.0 print replicated online model. Since then the site has evolved into a modern, Web 2.0 companion presentation. With Business Exchange, we now complement that with a social media platform where our users contribute and share information found anywhere on the Web for the benefit of each other.

Q: What are the 3 key lessons you have learned from the process of “activating” the BusinessWeek community via Business Exchange

1. You cannot “manage” community, you need to participate in the conversation and engage your community members on a personal level
2. You need to engage your users wherever they may be socializing on the Web “not just on your site” and, so we are active on Twitter (@bwbx) as well as LinkedIn (more on that below)
3. That business oriented users of our site act just like others social media participants do, with clear Key Influencers, Active and Passive users

Q: I notice that you are using the LinkedIn API to allow users to connect their profiles between the Business Exchange site and LinkedIn. What benefits does this connection offer to users and to the community at large?

Our LinkedIn involvement is a rare win-win-win situation. The user wins by automatically importing LinkedIn profile data to build their Business Exchange profile with minimum effort, a key point referenced by users via feedback. LinkedIn wins by exposing its business professional oriented social network to their target demographic on Business Exchange. BusinessWeek wins by linking with a large (45 million users) social network comprised of our target user.

We also utilize the Twitter API to allow for simultaneous posting of reactions to content linked into Business Exchange on users’ Twitter stream.

Q: How has the BusinessWeek print publication changed as a result of being connected with an online community of readers?

The BusinessWeek magazine and BusinessWeek.com Web site provide our readers with a multimedia business news presentation. Content on the BW.com site however changes daily and so reference from within the print magazine is limited. Business Exchange, by having a growing number of permanent topics to point to, now enables the magazine to add an info box at the end of articles pointing the reader to the relevant BX topic online for more information on the subject at hand.

Q: What advice about online communities would you have for other print publications trying to evolve their business strategy?

Should we or shouldn’t we: The only bad action is inaction. The future of print based media is uncertain, but what can be concluded today is that it will never be the same as it was and Web use will continue to rise. So, get online now.

Fallacy Believed by Many: Social media is easy, anyone can head up our effort. Just because your CEO has a LinkedIn profile, or your Marketing Manager is on Facebook doesn’t mean they understand social media or can successfully lead your foray onto the Web. And the folks who built your Web site? Let them stick to their area of expertise (there’s a reason lab-techs stay on the ground while astronauts man the capsule). Oh, and hiring an intern to do it because “they’re young and they get” it, doesn’t work either. Social Media is a skill set whose best purveyors are experienced professionals in the space and for whom participation in those sites is second nature. Find one to head your effort.

This month’s Online Community Expert Interview is with Dawn Lacallade. Dawn is a social media practitioner whose projects include Dell Community Forums, Ideastorm and currently the SolarWinds communities.

In her own words, Dawn “has a passion for releasing the full value of a completely integrated community and clearly demonstrating the results.” She is currently chasing this passion with the deeply integrated communities at SolarWinds, where community is one of the core tenants of business. As the Community Manager at SolarWinds, a Network Management Software company located in Austin, Texas, Dawn is responsible for the Community strategy, direct integration of Community in the SolarWinds products, growth of Community product extensions, Community engagement and implementation of all Community projects. Before joining SolarWinds, Dawn was the Manager of Ideastorm and the Dell Community Forums. She led the evolution from the focus on support forums to a broader integrated community including the Forums, Blogs, and Ideastorm.

Q: I’ve heard you use the term “deeply integrated community”. Can you define what you mean by that term?

When I say this, I mean simply the level of engagement with every aspect of the company. Often I will see companies that are deeply integrated with their community in a single area, like say a support community. That same company will have a marketing team that has no awareness or interest in involving the community in their processes. What about the website team? How about product development? A deeply integrated community is part of the core fabric of a company and can be seen in all groups. I see this as the next great evolution of the companies that thrive on customer satisfaction; get your customers involved in everything!

Q: During your time at Dell you were a key player on the IdeaStorm site. Looking back on that experience, can you talk about the 3 most important things that you personally learned as a community practitioner? In your opinion, do you think IdeaStorm is a sustainable model?

While I was not involved in the creation of Ideastorm, I did take responsibility for it after the first year. My focus, while working on Ideastorm, was to work with Salesforce to improve the technology to be more scalable. When the site was initially launched the functionality on the back side was very minimal. You had few tools to manage the hundreds or thousands of ideas that came in. You could not assign them to someone, check status, nag people, etc. This was all done manually via email (if you can imagine). The inherent tools within the Salesforce architecture and some gifted developers made an outstanding suite of tools in short order. I had huge learnings from this time.

Here are my top three that come specifically from Ideastorm:
1. A quality product (tool) is MUCH more than what you can do on the front end (from the user’s perspective). The back end is as important or perhaps even more important.
2. The largest challenge in a tool like this is not getting the feedback(people are dying to tell you), but in disseminating it within the company and prompting action.
3. Depending on your product lifecycle, the action can come more slowly.

Is Ideastorm a sustainable model? Good question. I think that it is much like the launch of any community tool; to be successful, the tool has to align with the goals and have the proper amount of resources and commitment from the company. In the community ideation space specifically; an Ideastorm is the broadest of strokes you can take. You are literally saying to anyone that has an idea about anything that you want to hear it, all at once, and they all expect responses. This could be way too much for many companies. Where I see the future of community ideation is in the hybrid models. These might allow the community to offer ideas and comments on a topic that the company lays out. Or perhaps the community picks the topics and then the company selects the questions. Either way delivers more targeted feedback on the areas that you have the most need at the moment so you can better align with business pain points and product roadmap timing.

Q: The boundaries between many “corporate” web sites and their social corollaries are softening (and in some cases being erased). Do you see this trend at solarwinds? How is it playing out in your day to day online strategy? What do you see longer term?

I agree the lines are blurring, particularly in the support communities. Indeed at SolarWinds we have some content that is currently shown on both the SolarWinds.com site as well as on thwack (our user community). As we continue to look at the community as partners in all that we do, this linkage will continue to grow. As for the sites moving together, absolutely that is happening. Anyone looking at thwack over the last 18 months has seen a much closer integration with SolarWinds.com.

As for the general future of this trend, I believe the best option for the end user is a blending of the traditional website and the community offerings. Back to the support site example, a blend of documentation and support avenues from a traditional website with the community generated/vetted/edited content delivers the best value to a user. I believe users need both the fully vetted content created by the company as well as the more agile content created by the community. I think the combination will ensure that the long tail of content that is often overwhelming for a company is addressed via the community. I don’t know that anyone has struck a perfect balance out there yet. (if someone has one, please let me know!) I think many companies are working on this blend and it will be the future of the on-line support website.

Q: Many community teams are struggling with which metrics to measure to assess the health of their community, as well as to quantify and qualify value back to the organization. Can you share your guidance on metrics, and any thoughts you might have on the importance (or lack of) for proving “ROI”?

Wow, I could write a novel on this subject. In my opinion, there is nothing more important than having clear goals and measures to evaluate the success of those goals. I propose there are three main groups of measures you should be reviewing weekly (for the community manager) and monthly for the “Stakeholders”. (Stakeholders include your management team as well as management from any other groups that are involved in the funding, benefits, or strategy of the community) Here are my groups and a description of what they include.
1. Business Measures: These show how you directly move business measures via your work. These HAVE TO BE specific to your company. There is no one size fits all for discovering these measures. Let me explain. For example: A support forum allows questions and answers. The metric might be “answered posts” and “views of answered posts”, but neither of these is the metric the business follows. To be a good business measure, it needs to be in the business terms (is it on one of the business scorecards?). In this example you would gain agreement that one answered question = one call avoided into the support call center. You might then decide that 1% of all views of the answered content is also considered one call avoided. This would give you a number of calls avoided per week/month/quarter/year. That is the level these metrics need to go to be relevant to the business stakeholders.
2. Community Health Measures: This group generally shows the activity on the site. These include the common measures of new registrations, posts, page views, visits, unique visitors, search data and sentiment. In these measures you are looking for trends and the actions that drive activity. For example, if you had a very high month, was it because you had a brilliant new product released or because your brilliant new product had a huge flaw that made people angry? You must understand the causes of change for these measures to have true value.
3. User Behavior Reports: In order to truly understand and connect with the community, you need to know what the behaviors are and when they change. For example, you know that John has been a power user for the past year posting 5 answers a week. For the past 3 weeks, you have not seen John. This should be a huge red flag for you to reach out and check on John. A truly gifted community manager will notice these things. It enables you to thank those that go above and beyond and bring back those that might be disillusioned.

Q: Lastly, any advice for those interested in becoming a community manager?

This is a fantastic and dynamic field! I think the rules are still being made and it changes almost daily! For this and many other reasons, I recommend this field to others often. I have found that those that come into this field from a passion for customers and for improving business do much better than those that come with a campaign mentality. Here are a couple of lessons learned to consider:
1. Learn from many sources: Books, websites, benchmarking and certainly talking with those that have done this before.
2. Don’t believe anyone that says there is a one size fits all answer for community. No such thing.
3. Start by joining communities and observing. What works? What doesn’t? Your observations as a user are great data for your gig as a Community Manager.
4. Drive your organization to CLEAR goals before beginning anything.
5. Build a strong relationship with your community and then when you make mistakes, they will forgive you.
6. Get to know your users as people (goes with above).
7. Never overpromise to either your Stakeholders or your Community. It breaks trust.
8. Keep one eye on the new tools, but don’t get caught up with a shiny object when a tried and true forum for example would do better for your goal.
9. Don’t be afraid to learn as you go.
10. And the most important, Don’t ever over sell your abilities. I have met several people that make their resume sound like they know/have done more than they have.