The next Online Community Research Network project is open for participation. As part of our ongoing research around online community and social media strategy, metrics and ROI, we’ve launched our latest study on Social Media Strategy and Monitoring.

The intention of the study is to explore how organizations are managing their social media strategies what tools they are using to monitor their social media presence.

If you are involved in the development of your organizations’ Social Media and Community strategy and monitoring, I would encourage you to participate in a short survey here:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/socmedmon

The topics we are exploring in this project include:

• Key policies for staff participation in social media;
• Highest priority social media sites;
• Organizational business goals for participating in the social media ecosystem;
• Metrics and tools used to measure success on social media sites;
• The biggest challenges that executives and teams are facing

I would ask that you please complete the survey by next Friday, 7/16. All participants will get a copy of the results.

The tag for this research project is: #socmedmon

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.

The next Online Community Research Network project is open for participation. In January, OCRN members discussed and prioritized a long list of topics, and the issue that made top of the list was “Developing Social a Strategy”.

The OCRN chose to study how social media strategy is developed, communicated and implemented because, frankly, so many organizations are actively struggling with the topic. We hope that by getting real-world feedback, advice and experiences from practitioners (read: the folks ACTUALLY doing the work), we can all gain insight in to this important topic.

If you are involved in the development of your organizations Social Media and Community strategy, I would encourage you to participate in a short survey here:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ocr_socstrat

The topics we are exploring in this project include:

• The definition of social media strategy;
• The current scope of community and social media efforts;
• The current state of strategy development;
• The process organizations are using to develop strategy;
• Ownership and governance of social strategy;
• The biggest challenges that executives and teams are facing

I would ask that you please complete the survey by next Friday, 3/12. All participants will get a copy of the results.

The tag for this research project is: #socstrat

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

Last month, the Online Community Research Network conducted our second study that examines how community and social media professionals engage in the social media ecosystem, Participating in the Social Media Ecosystem. In April 2009, we conducted the Social Media Ecosystem study to gain a better understanding of how organizations were managing their hosted and external online community touch points.

Our goal with the Participating in the Social Media Ecosystem report was to gain more information on how companies participate, how frequently they engage in activities in the social media ecosystem, who manages the participation, and what value participants’ companies have gained from their activities.

We received approximately 125 responses. Participants represent a healthy swath of the types of organizations participating in online community building activities, including: large software companies, large community destination sites, niche community sites, platform providers, interactive marketing firms and independent consultants.

A sample of the 125+ organizations that participated include (with their permission):
Microsoft, Intuit, Best Buy, Cisco, Museum of Life and Science, VMWare, BusinessWeek, Autodesk, Consumer Reports, Time Inc., REI, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Quest Software, WiserEarth, Current TV, and TripIt.

Several key issues pertaining to participating in social media ecosystems surfaced during this report, including:

• More than half of the participants, 56%, have developed a comprehensive social media strategy within the last 6 months compared. In our last Social Media Ecosystems study in March of 2009, only 18% of the respondents had a comprehensive strategy in place.
• The two most common changes respondents made in their social media strategies over the last six months are:
  • Utilization of Social Media Sites, such as Twitter and Facebook   
  • Refinement based on Lessons Learned

• Twitter and Facebook emerged as the prevailing social media sites. 92% of respondents use Twitter and 87% of respondents use Facebook.
• Google Analytics is the most commonly used tool to measure participation in the ecosystem.

Job Titles
A large percentage of the respondents have high level positions within their organization such as Owner, Partner, Director, CEO, CFO, Vice President or Manager. Over a third of the participants are managers 35%, with the title ‘Social Media Manager’ or ‘Community Manager’ being the most common management title reported. Other management positions that respondents held were Project Manager, Product Manager, Program Manager and Marketing Manager.
Other common job titles included: Principal, Account Executive, Community / Social Media Strategist, Social Media Coordinator and Consultant.

It is interesting to note that 26 of the respondents have the word “Community” in their job title, whereas only 11 have ”Social Media” in their job title.

Social Media Strategy
More than half of the participants, 56%, have developed a comprehensive social media strategy within the last 6 months and 30% (37) are currently working on a comprehensive social media strategy.

Social Media Strategy Changes
Respondents indicated that the most common change in their social media strategies over the last six months was the utilization, integration and enhancements of social media sites, such as Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr. The integration and enhancement of Twitter was the most commonly reported change. Some participants felt that staying current with these social media sites was critical to their company’s marketing and outreach. Some respondents indicated that they had also created a blog within the last six months.

Content Monitoring Responsibility
Almost three quarters of the respondents, 71% (61), said that an employee that holds a manager role in is responsible for creating and monitoring social media content for their organization. These managers include Community Managers, Marketing Managers, Social Media Managers and Program Managers.

• 22%    (19) have a Community Manager responsible for creating content
• 22%    (19) have a Marketing Manager responsible for creating content
• 21%    (18) have a Social Media Manager responsible for creating content
6%    (5) have a Program Manager responsible for creating content
• 2%    (2) have a Moderator responsible for creating content
• 2%    (2) have a C-Level Executive responsible for creating content
• 25%    (22) have Other people responsible for creating content

Key Social Media Sites
Twitter and Facebook are by far the most popular social media sites, according to the respondents. 92% the respondents said that they utilize Twitter and 87% said that they utilize Facebook. Several respondents indicated from the answer to a previous question, that Twitter was introduced in their organization within the last 6 months.

The other most commonly used social media sites are:
• 75% (95) of respondents said that they used Blogs
• 71% (90) of respondents said that they used LinkedIn
• 71% (89) of respondents said that they used YouTube

The least utilized social media sites, included Sphinn, iLike, Slashdot, Techmeme, and Friendster.

The Complete Participating in the Social Media Ecosystem Report
The full 33 page report can be purchased here: http://store.onlinecommunityresearch.com/painsomeec.html and includes detailed information, analysis and charts on:

• Organization type and size
• Social media strategy changes
• Staff participation in Social Media
• Content Schedule / Calendar
• Content Monitoring Responsibility
• Staff Engagement
• User Generated Content
• Metrics Used to Measure Engagement
• Case Studies from leading companies

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

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

A few key points to begin with:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As with anything, you mileage may vary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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