The intention of the study is to explore how organizations are managing and measuring their email marketing programs.

The specific topics we are exploring in this project include:

• Types of email marketing
• Frequency of email marketing campaigns and newsletters
• Email marketing services and their costs
• Most valuable email marketing features
• Metrics used for evaluating email marketing efforts

The survey should take approximately five minutes to complete.

If you decide to participate, there are few things to note:

• All participants will receive a copy of the final (aggregate) report – a $295 value.
• All data will be processed and compiled in aggregate. Data will not be reviewed or presented in a personally (or organizationally) identifiable way.

If interested, please participate in the study by Friday, 1/21. Please go here to participate in the survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/YX3VSB7

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1) Could you say a few words about Acquia? What are you trying to accomplish?

Drupal usage was growing like mad in the mid-2007 time frame, especially in larger organizations. But many of the companies looking at Drupal were hesitant because they saw no single go-to vendor for Drupal support, in the same way that they may typically view the role of a proprietary software vendor, or the way they might view RedHat (or MySQL when it was independent.) This was holding back Drupal adoption, and I knew we could solve that problem by creating an enterprise subscription support business along the model of RedHat, MySQL, etc.

Plus, there were some obvious network services that we felt were important to add value to an organization’s Drupal site, such as update and uptime management, advanced website search, Drupal-tuned higher-end hosting, and others. And the list of these potential services we can provide to organizations continues to grow as Drupal continues its march into wider deployment.

So I joined with Dries Buytaert, founder and project lead of Drupal, to create Acquia to provide both subscription support & value-add network services to organizations using Drupal.

One thing we’ve been careful to do is to carefully avoid doing actual website construction as much as possible. We feel that for Drupal to continue to grow there needs to be a healthy ecosystem of Drupal development shops around the world. If we stepped too boldly into the professional services realm, we could unintentionally limit that growth, either by being a magnet for customers seeking site construction or by acting as a risk factor for entrepreneurs who wanted to work with Drupal. So though we do some work in this area, we have an established list of professional service partners to whom we feed the vast majority of this type of inquiry as referrals – without even the requirement that the partner sell an Acquia product to the end customer (though, of course, that’s our preference.)

2) You’ve recently launched a community platform called “Commons”. What is it. Why did you decide to launch this?

Two reasons.

First, we wanted to reduce the cost of building a social business software site in Drupal. We were receiving a drumbeat of inbound inquiries from customers who were looking at social software tools like Jive and others, but who needed more than simply the social software side; they needed their site to perform additional, non-social things. Some of these prospects had seen social-style sites built using Drupal, such as Symantec, Novell, and others, and wanted to know how to get one of those. Fortunately, social business sites can be built in Drupal; unfortunately, there was lots of discovery & work to do in order to find the right Drupal plug-ins, figure out an information architecture, etc. We figured if we did the bulk of the heavy-lifting once, and pulled together all the plug-ins, created the IA, page types, content types, interaction models, etc., all that would be left would be for companies to customize the graphical look & feel to their liking, and then focus their attention on the added capabilities they may want, such as integration with CRM, or web-based training, etc.

Second, there’s kind of a principle involved. When we looked at those other solutions (e.g. Jive, et. al.), we could see that the feature set was pretty well stabilized. This was confirmed by a conversation with Jeffrey Mann, a Gartner analyst, and by Jeremiah Owyang at Altimeter Group. And when we looked at this feature set, there was nary a thing that Drupal couldn’t already do; it just needed pre-assembly! So it felt strongly to me like this market was ripe for commoditization by a viable open source alternative. When software gets commoditized, customer organizations win because of lower cost and the ability to consolidate and reduce the number of supported platforms in their environment. Since many organizations were _already_ going to be using Drupal, let’s give them a Drupal-based social software suite, and accelerate this market commoditization for their benefit. Of course, Acquia is already set up as a business to profit from this, so we’ll do well in the process – possibly at the expense of proprietary vendors.

3) The higher-end community platform market is dominated by proprietary platforms. Why should an organization consider open source in this space? What will they be giving up?

I’ve already given a couple of examples above, but let me state them slightly differently for this answer.

First, many of the organizations seeking to deploy a social site need more than just a social site; they need the site to integrate with some existing business system, or to create completely new, custom-to-them capabilities. Proprietary alternatives will only let you get so far with this; organizations are limited by the structure of the system and the available APIs that flow from that. Conversely, Drupal has been, and will always be a strong application platform for many purposes. There are thousands of add-on plug-ins (“modules”) that can extend Drupal, plus a vast array of mature APIs to do things where there’s no module available. (This is why it was so easy to make Drupal into a social software solution.)

No other platform provides the freedom to adapt your social site to your other business needs – or to the special needs of your community.

Second, using Drupal Commons can consolidate infrastructure. Drupal is in use on over a million websites today, and it is fairly likely that there’s at least one Drupal website in operation at the organization of somebody reading this note! By basing your social business site on Drupal, you give your IT team leverage to manage what they already know. Even if you don’t have Drupal in your organization today, it’s rapid growth as a web platform means it could well be in your “mainstream website” future anyway; so Drupal Commons can be the vanguard of a consolidated future.

Finally, using Drupal Commons frees you from the tyranny of software license fees. Proprietary vendors survive by finding ways to get you to pay for software, then pay again at points in the future, such as at major upgrade time, or at a size bump, etc. Drupal Commons is open source, and the economics of open source are dramatically more favorable than proprietary alternatives.

4) Are you noting any big trends in web interactivity? Anything your client base seems particularly interested in these days?

The most interesting area to me, and the area we haven’t really yet explored in Drupal Commons, is game-ifying social interactions. In Drupal Commons, users earn points for posting content, making comments, updating their profile, etc. We see some users spending time making LOTS of contributions simply so they can be the top-dog in points on a site. Essentially, they are gaming the site for their own gratification.

While use behavior certainly drives contributions by specific members, the interesting question is how we could harness this “game-playing” type motivation to into positive rewards for all users. This can be used in areas like group innovation and ideation, where users can make proportionate bets (votes) on product ideas in order to get features they want. Or you can use virtual goods sales and barter to drive desired behaviors on the site.

While this isn’t yet a big trend, I see evidence that it’s a big potential trend. Some of our customers are doing some early experiments in this area, and learning what works, and what doesn’t. I think we’ll see more on this in the next 12-18 months.

5) What’s the five year view? Groups that are now using Commons – what do you think they will be asking for a few years down the road?

One word: Scalability. As groups get successful, all kinds of new issues arise. A successful externally-facing social site will become a target for Comment spammers trying to boost SEO for some site, leading to the need to fight comment spam. Social sites with very large active user counts will sap the capabilities of the infrastructure they’re initially deployed on, and organizations will need to react with more horsepower. And those are just the technical needs.

Separate from that will be the need for wise community management. Communities don’t assemble for the benefit of the site owner; they only have their own interests to serve. If a site successfully creates a community, organizations will need to have a healthy relationship with that community such that they let it continue to thrive, but still make sure it is serving the organizations purpose.

I don’t know how these get played out a few years from now. But fortunately, the Drupal Community itself encounters a lot of these kinds of issues before the wider world does, and I am confident that Drupal Commons will always have leading-edge tools to help organizations deal with the issues.

6) Any other comments on web interactivity?

Yup, one. Though we’ve definitely done some advance work for organizations by defining an information architecture for a social business site in Drupal Commons, user experience is still something that can be tuned in Drupal Commons – and organizations that want to be successful in their Commons deployment should plan on spending some time and paying for help to create a terrific user experience for their users. Social sites succeed or fail based on how easy and engaging the site is for its users, and each community is going to have different needs. This is why it’s so important to build a community on Drupal, because of the massive freedom Drupal gives you to do this.

Not to toot your horn inappropriately, but in my mind this is exactly where a partner like Forum One comes in. You guys know communities, and you have people dedicated to use experience design. It’s going to be crucial for Acquia’s customers to utilize our partners like Forum One to be successful with their Drupal Commons deployments. And I’m not just sayin’ that because it’s you asking the question! .

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Forum One has designed and managed networks of organizations over the years. Here are five quick tips, drawn mostly from the Online Community Research Network, a community of organizations we have managed since 2005:

1) Identity: The network of organizations needs an online home (and probably name). The web home is typically built upon a third party “workspace” product such as CentralDesktop, SharePoint or ProjectSpaces (a Forum One service). One product we like for this purpose is GroupSite – it includes the appropriate features and it’s easy to use.

2) Conversation: Most workspace products support online discussions, but require periodic supplement from a traditional web conferences. Recently we’ve been using Adobe Connect, which we find to be capable, reasonably priced and non-intimidating for newbies.

3) Activity: In order to grow and prosper, the network requires high-value activities. One tactic we use are network surveys, supported by SurveyMonkey, which are a fast and easy way to engender participation and identify best practices and resources.

4) Events: Online tools and activities are great, but they are generally not sustainable unless participants are meeting periodically in person. Increasingly, every online community needs an offline counterpart (and vice versa!).

5) Staffing: Any robust network will require dedicated staffing. It also will require governance rules and (possibly the trickiest challenge) a source of funding drawn from across the network.

We see the development of networks of organizations as a tremendously promising new opportunity for our clients. They require planning, effort and resources, but allow coordination and shared resources needed to address the most difficult societal challenges.

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Answer: Nothing.

Russia and China have taken diametrically opposed approaches to Twitter (and social media more generally). They provide a wonderful set of case studies to watch this year.

Probably no government has embraced Twitter with more finesse than Russia (and that includes the US). During President Medvedev’s US visit last June, he visited Twitter headquarters in San Francisco and posted his first tweet. Since then the Kremlin has provided a constant stream of timely, informative, casual tweets posted in Russian and English. They include substance as well as a bit of whimsy (including impromptu photos). The two accounts currently have about 125,000 followers.

Meanwhile the Chinese block Twitter and officially ignore it (but not the Chinese press: China Daily shows hundreds of articles this year mentioning Twitter).

President Hu is scheduled to visit the US early next year. Will he ignore social media, or have a change of heart and also visit Twitter headquarters?

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We received approximately 59 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.

Several key issues pertaining to social media strategy and monitoring surfaced during this report, including:

• Two thirds of the respondents, 66% (39), indicated that their organization has either fully or partially written social media guidelines.
• The three most commonly reported policies that respondents said were important for staff participation in social media were:
  • Follow All Existing Employee Guidelines (23)
  • Be Transparent (20)
  • Respect Audience and Coworkers (20)
• Over three quarters of the respondents rated Facebook, 75% (44) and Twitter, 73% (43) as a 1st or 2nd highest priority social media site in which their organization participates.
• Almost a third of participants, 29% (17), indicated that their organization uses paid tools or services to monitor social media sites, with Radian6 (7) being the most commonly reported.

Size of Organization
Over a third of the respondents, 34% (20), have less than 50 people employed in their organization and only 12% (7) respondents reported having more than 5,000 employees.

• 34% (20) belong to an organization that has less than 50 employees
• 30% (18) belong to an organization that has between 50-499 employees
• 7% (4) belong to an organization that has between 500-999 employees
• 10% (6) belong to an organization that has between 1,000-4,999 employees
• 7% (4) belong to an organization that has between 5,000-9,999 employees
• 12% (7) belong to an organization that has more than 10,000 employees

Key Policies for Staff Participation
The three most commonly reported policies that respondents said were important for staff participation in social media was to Follow All Existing Employee Guidelines (23), Transparency (20) and to Respect Audience and Coworkers (20).

A third of the respondents also indicated that Adding Value (19), Being Polite and Courteous (18), Protecting Confidential Company Information (18) and Using Your Best Judgment (18) were considered key policies for staff participation in Social Media within their organization.

Social Media Business Goals
Most respondents rated all of the business goals as having some importance within their organization’s social media ecosystem.

The most important business goal reported was Driving traffic to the main organization web site, with almost three quarters of the participants, 73% (43), indicating that this was considered a very important goal for their organization.

The second highest rated social media business goal was Branding, 71% (42). Only 10% (6) participants said that Branding had no significance to their organization.

The next four most important business goals according to the respondent’s ratings were Retaining customers / loyalty, peer-to-peer evangelism, Educations, and Evangelism. These had similar ratings with at least half of the respondents rating them as very important business goals for their organization’s social media ecosystem.

Even though Peer-to-peer customer service and Recruiting had the lowest ratings, more than two thirds of those that rated the importance of these business goals said that they had some importance to their organization.

Measuring Success
We received a wide variety of responses to this question. The most common metrics measured on social media sites is the Traffic Generated (25) including: General Traffic Generated (10), Number of Clicks (7), Number of Page Views (4), Number of Returns (2) and Number of Site Visits (2). One participant commented, “We use Google Analytics to measure clicks to the company website, clicks to other social networking sites, duration of time spent, and direction of traffic”.

The second most common metric that respondents said they used to measure success on social media sites was related to user participation in the site content, such as, comments, posts and discussions (22), The amount and quality of content posted was said to be important for many participants. One participant said that, they track the percentage of positive comments versus the percentage of negative comments. Several other participants said that they monitored the Amount of Engagement (5) that was happening on social media sites.

Several participants indicated that they measure the Number of Brand Mentions (8) within user content posted on their company site and also in mainstream media content, with one response comment as follows: “We measure the percentage of participation within discussion related specifically to our company and market, the number of Brand Mentions versus Competitors and topic and sentiment tracking related to our company and competitors”.

Other commonly reported metrics that participants said they measure are the Number of Fans / Followers (16) on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as website follower friends and fans. Tracking the Number of Members / Registrations (8) such as website registrations and other social media membership sites such as LinkedIn group membership was also said by some to be used to measure success within their organization.

Tracking the Number of Leads / Referrals (14) was also mentioned by many participants to be useful in measuring success on social media sites, with participants commenting that they monitor referrals from social networking sites, as well as goal specific metrics such as revenue, sales and leads.

Number of Retweets (7), Number of likes’ (5), Ratings (2), Number of Video Plays (2) and Number of Unique Users (2) were among the other metrics that participants said their organization used to measure social media success.

The Complete Social Media Strategy & Monitoring Report

The full 31 page report may be purchased here: http://store.onlinecommunityresearch.com/somestmo.html and includes detailed information, analysis and charts on:

• Job title and industry
• Online community destination
• Social media guidelines
• Social media sites
• Paid services and tools
• Comments and advice from survey respondents

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We received approximately 51 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.

Several key issues pertaining to online community platforms and services surfaced during this report, including:

• Nearly half of the respondents, 49% (17), indicated that their online community platform and services budget is less than $50,000.
• The three most commonly used primary platforms, apart from in-house custom made platforms, were:
  • Blogs / Forums
  • Lithium
  • Jive
• Over a quarter of the respondents, 27% (13), are actively looking for a new online community platform.
• A third of the respondents, 33% (17), indicated that they used Google Analytics as their Metrics & Reporting tool and 12% (6) use Omniture.

Job Title
A high percentage of the respondents have high level positions within their organization, with Community Director positions, 29% (15), being most frequently reported. Director related job titles include Director of Communities, Community Relations Director, Director of Social Networking, Managing Director, Regional Director, Senior Director Customer Experience and Director Community and Products.

The second most commonly reported job title was Community Manager, 21% (11), with an additional, 12% (6) of respondents reporting other Management job titles including Associate Manager Consumer Insights, Community Product Manager, Product Manager, Program Manager and Senior Program Manager of Client Programs.

It is interesting to note that over half of the respondent, 55% (28) have the word “Community” in their job titles, whereas only 2 have the word “Media” in their job titles.”).

Platform Attributes
The two most commonly reported attributes that respondents said was important when purchasing a new community platform was the Feature set of the platform (28) and the Ability to customize the user interface (26). Over half of the respondents indicated that these two factors were among the top 3 attributes they used in making purchasing decision.

Other attributes that respondents felt were important in the decision making process include the Price or Pricing Structure, Ability to scale the platform and the Reporting functionality of the platform.

It is interesting to note that the maturity of the platform option was only selected by 3 participants as an important factor when considering a new platform. Respondents were interested in newer, flexible platforms that have advanced features and customizable interfaces.

Platform Features
86% (44) of the respondents said that their company’s current community platform utilizes Discussion Forums. This was the most commonly reported feature reported during this survey and was 17% higher than the second most utilized feature, Blogs 69% (35).

Approximately half of the respondents indicated that their organization used Groups, 51% (26), and Surveys & Polls, 49% (25), as part of their current company’s platform.

The least reported feature that people used in their current platform was Chat 18% (9).

Community Platforms – Rated
Overall ratings to this question were above average in every area, with the highest average ratings given for the vendor delivering the platform on deadline (4.9) and post-purchase support from the vendor (4.8). The lowest average rating was given the platform’s capabilities in the area of Metrics & Reporting (4.0). All these ratings are out of a rating of 6.0.

HIGHEST AVERAGES:
The following Platforms were reported as having the highest averages (all attributes):

• HiveLive’s LiveConnect (5.4 out of a rating of 6)
• Leverage Software (5.4 out of a rating of 6)
• Groupsite (5.3 out of a rating of 6)

The Complete Online Community Platform Services & Satisfaction 2010 Report

The full 42 page report may be purchased here: http://store.onlinecommunityresearch.com/coplsesa20.html and includes detailed information, analysis and charts on:

• Organization Type and Size
• Annual Community Platform Budgets
• Respondents Primary Community Platforms
• Detailed Ratings of Community Platform Features and Functionality
• Other Products & Services Used for Community Operations
• Platforms & Services Wish List

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The intention of the study is to explore how organizations are managing their social media strategies and 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

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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.

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If you are involved in strategy or management of your organization’s online community strategy or management, I would encourage you to participate in a short survey here:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/XWPJF79

The topics we are exploring in this project include:

* Review of current online community platform;
* Other community vendor services (metrics, sentiment analysis, moderation, etc.)
* Services you’d like to see but are currently unavailable

I would ask that you please complete the survey by next Friday, 6/17. All participants will get a copy of the results! Thanks!

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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.

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