Online Community Report

Unconference East: Moving Forward, Together

nospam@example.com (Bill Johnston) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 20:21:49 -0500

We are less than 48 hours from the Online Community Unconference East (yeah!). This is the third year we've run the Online Community Unconference in New York, and we've had great events both years.

On think I wanted to be a bit more mindful of for this year's Unconference was to really be mindful of focusing the group's energy on specific outcomes. Our theme for this year's Uncoference reflects this intention:

"Moving forward, together"

We will use the theme as a guiding principle for the sessions on Wednesday, and ask that participants think about what is needed to move forward personally, professionally, and to move community and social media forward as an industry. We will also explore what progress (moving forward) looks like.

Our notional topic list from the Unconference wiki (which will be open to the public after the Unconference) reflects the "moving forward" intention:

Online Community & Social Media Metrics: Getting to Standards
Monetizing industry communities (not related to a single brand or company)
The Community Team: Roles, Responsibilities, Job Descriptions and Reporting Structures
Using Community and Collaboration Tools Within the Enterprise
Lessons Learned: Pitfalls and Best Practices in Community-Building
How to hire community & Social Media staff
Online Presence: Creating a social strategy on and beyond your domain
"Social Shopping" Communities (focus on online brand advocacy, product reviews and ratings, "social" information search, etc.)
Leaving (too many) online footprints in (too many) communities
How to interest and keep volunteers in a commercial environment?
Beyond "Listening" - Comprehensive Community & Social Media monitoring and engagement
Community and Social Media reporting and insights
Case Studies for the class of 2009: Successful community engagements and social media campaigns from 2009 (bring yours to share)
Validation: Do verified accounts make a difference in communities for better engagement?

There are still tickets available for the Unconference. For more information (including attendee list), please go here:
http://ocue2010.eventbrite.com/

Social Media Week February 1-5

nospam@example.com (Heather Virga) — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 13:18:10 -0500

February 1st through 5th is Social Media Week. Social Media Week features a week of social media events, including, conferences, discussions, and meet-ups that take place simultaneously in multiple cities around the world. The aim of each event is to advance the use and understanding of social media in the corporate, public and non-profit sectors. Check out the event schedule to see a listing of all of the social media events in San Francisco this week.

We're very excited to co-host a panel discussion with Autodesk on Social Media for Social Impact on February 4th. The panel will explore the use of social media in making progress on social causes, and panelists will review case studies, criteria for success and lessons learned from each of the panelists.

Our panelists include:

Connie Chan, Yahoo! / Yahoo! for Good
Connie Chan is manager of Yahoo! for Good, the company’s Social Responsibility department. Connie is responsible for leading Yahoo!’s online cause marketing initiatives and managing social media for Yahoo! Green.

Amy Skoczlas Cole, eBay
Amy is the Director of the eBay Green Team, Amy leads eBay’s efforts to engage their 89 million active users in a movement to use products that exist in world, saving consumers money as well as helping protect the planet.

Peggy Duvette, WiserEarth
Peggy Duvette, Executive Director of WiserEarth, advocates for building online community capacity in the nonprofit sector. Since 2005, she has managed WiserEarth, an online community space that allows organizations and individuals to connect and collaborate around social and environmental issues.

Susan Tenby, TechSoup
Susan Tenby is the Online Community Director at San Francisco-based nonprofit TechSoup Global and leads an active community of nonprofit staff and volunteers in Second Life.

All proceeds from the event will be donated to the American Red Cross Haiti Relief Fund.

hashtag: #sm4si

The Social Media Club is featuring a panel discussion on Innovation Through Real-Time Feedback Loops on February 4th, 6:30pm - 9:00pm.
Go here to register: http://smwloops.eventbrite.com/

In this interactive panel event, we will discuss and demonstrate:

What new prescriptions for human interaction should media practitioners embrace to leverage through real-time feedback loops
How Social Media tools can be used to facilitate idea generation
How to employ a the Real-Time Feedback Loop methodology for competitive advantage

The panelists are:

Ravit Lichtenberg, CEO Ustrategy
Sylvia L. Marino, Executive Director - Community Operations & Social Media, Edmunds.com
Liza Sperling, Real-Time Sentiment & Trends Analyst, Scout Labs
Tom Foremski, Founder & Editor, Silicon Valley Watcher
Van Riper, Founder & Leader, Silicon Valley Google Technology User Group
Bill Johnston, Director, Online Community Research Network, ForumOne
David Libby, SVP, MS&L Worldwide
Evan Solomon, VP of Marketing, JustinTV
Marc Smolowitz, Executive Producer - Media & Technology Consultant

Why You Should Sponsor the Online Community Unconference East

nospam@example.com (Bill Johnston) — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 17:57:10 -0500

I'll start with a caveat: this is a flat out, unapologetic (but hopefully entertaining) pitch. That's me in the photo below, the unapologetic pitcher.

As you know, Forum One is hosting the Online Community Unconference East in New York City on February 10th. The Unconference is an open space gathering of online community and social media professionals from the commercial and non profit sectors. We expect over 200 participants (our biggest east coast event yet).

A partial list of organizations coming includes AARP, Answers.com, Autodesk, Bloomberg, Cisco, Consumer Reports, Examiner.com, Google, HP, Huffington Post, IBM, iVillage / NBC, kgb, Microsoft, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Scotttrade and TripAdvisor (to name a few). Pretty great group, no?

The Pitch - 3 Reasons
We feel like our Unconference events represent one of the best sponsorship values for events around, for three main reasons:

1. Fantastic (but appropriate) Visibility
As a sponsor, you will receive the "normal" event perks - your logo on conference materials, acknowledgement at the event, a sponsor banner. The key to our sponsors' success is that we don't oversell our sponsorships, and we limit the number of service providers attending the event so that the ratio of practitioners to service providers is favorable (which also makes for a better attendee experience). You will also have an opportunity to address the full conference for 5 minutes shortly after lunch. In short: Limited competition for attention, you are free to participate as an attendee, and you get the events full attention shortly after lunch.

2. Good Value
Our packages start at $5k, with our premiere package at $10k. Many events with smaller, less qualified audiences charge twice that, and typically try to cram in as many sponsors in as possible.

3. Attendees are Senior Staff and Have Purchase Power / Influence
Forum One has been hosting online community and social media events for almost 10 years. Over the years, we have curated a very senior network of community practitioners and executives. Most of the attendees at our conferences have direct purchase influence, and many have purchase authority. Business gets done at our events between sponsors and attendees.

That's it in a nutshell: great event, great visibility, solid value and an awesome attendee list.

I want to be clear about our intentions with sponsorship sales: sponsorship helps us continue to run these events at a modest profit, which ensures a sustainable business. By sponsoring, you help support the larger community of social media and online community professionals.

Thanks for listening to my pitch. I really do appreciate your time and attention.

If you are interested in discussing terms, please contact me and Chloe Caviness (our sales manager).

Now back to our regularly scheduled community programing

Online Community Expert Interview: Rawn Shah, IBM

nospam@example.com (Bill Johnston) — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 18:28:28 -0500

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.

What to expect at the Online Community Unconference East

nospam@example.com (Bill Johnston) — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 11:26:00 -0500

The Online Community Unconference East will be held February 10th in New York City. To learn more about the event, or to register, go here: http://ocue2010.eventbrite.com/ .

So, how does this Unconference thing work?
The premise of our Unconference series is that the best source of information on online communities and social media is the community of practitioners actually doing the hands on work. The Unconference format provides a venue for participants to lead discussions about topics they are most passionate and knowledgeable about. At the end of the day, attendees walk away with new ideas, perspectives, and a long list of new professional connections.

One of the most amazing parts of the day at our Unconferences is the topic selection process. Our Unconference uses the organizing principals of Open Space Technology to create the event agenda. Said another way, the topics discussed during the day are suggested and lead by Unconference attendees. At the start of the morning, any attendee who wishes can come forward, announce a topic, and claim one of the 50+ open slots on the grid.

Attendees announce session topics

The agenda begins to form

Within about 35-40 minutes the grid fills up with topics

Once all the topics are announced, we begin the Unconference sessions. The agenda grid plays the role of gathering place and ideamarketplace throughout the day, as attendees come back to the agenda to check for any updates, changes, or new sessions.

Outputs
If you would like to see an example of the great content that comes out of an Unconference, please check out a few of these resrouces:

I would encourage you to spend some time looking through the session notes and the book of proceedings, as there is a lot of great content.

Pictures from the Online Community Unconference East 2009

Again, to learn more about the event, or to register, go here: http://ocue2010.eventbrite.com/.

Announcing Community Manager Appreciation Day

nospam@example.com (Bill Johnston) — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 14:29:56 -0500

Last Friday, Jeremiah Owyang had a simple question: Is there a national day recognizing the work of Community Managers? The question spawned a conversation, which spawned a proposal for the day of recognition:

That days is today. Happy Community Manager Appreciation Day!

Every fourth Monday in January will be Community Manager Appreciation Day.

Community Managers have a challenging and exciting role. One the one hand, they are called on to be the personification of their organization to the online communities that they manage. One the other hand, they are also charged with being the advocate for the community back to the organization. Sort of like a benevolent double agent. The role of the community manager is evolving quickly as well, and we are starting to see the “swiss army knife” aspects of the role mature in to distinct roles on the community team: community product manager, moderator, internal community manager, social media manager, social ux designer, and many more disciplines.

We should take time to celebrate the folks doing the hands on work of shaping, supporting and nurturing online communities.

Background about Community Manager Appreciation Day from Jeremiah’s blog:

Now, Recognize A Community Manager, Every 4th Monday of January
While we agree with common manners to always thank someone after they’ve helped you, just take a moment to pause.. and think. Why would someone willingly go through the above mentioned challenges? Because of their passion to improve the company, and help customers have a better relationship. In many cases, a genuine ‘thank you’ can mean more than a yearly customer satisfaction survey. Take the time to recognize and thank the community manager that may have helped you while you during your time of need.
If you’re a customer, and your problem was solved by a community manager be sure to thank them in the medium that helped you in. Use the hashtag #CMAD.
If you’re a colleague with community manager, take the time to understand their passion to improve the customer –and company experience. Copy their boss.
If you’re a community manager, stop and breathe for a second, and know that you’re appreciated. Hug your family.
This isn’t just about a single role, but a bigger trend of making product and services more efficient, and thereby our world a little bit more efficient and sustainable.

I happily endorsed this proposal along with the following community leaders Jeremiah pulled together over the weekend:

Connie Benson, Rachel Happe, Jake McKee, Sean O’Driscoll, Lane Becker, Dawn Foster, Thor Muller, Amy Muller and Jeremiah Owyang.

Online Community and Social Media Jobs

nospam@example.com (Heather Virga) — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 16:13:34 -0500

Happy New Year OC Report readers and job seekers. We have 12 online community / social media jobs listed below from various companies in the US and abroad. All of these jobs are also posted on the Forum One Networks website and featured in this month's OC Report newsletter.

In addition to all of the job listings below, we wanted to highlight a new position that we are looking to fill here at Forum One. The position is for a Community Manager that will help build a network of online community and social media professionals, expand the visibility of our work, and strengthen our already-thriving relationships with prominent companies. Go here for more information about the position.

Forum One Communications
Community Manager

Fremont Consulting's client
Online Portal (liferay) Community Manager

Opinion Research Corporation
Director or Social Media Networks

Appolicious.com
Community/Social Media Intern

Baptie & Company, Inc.
Community Manager – Hi-tech Channels (Denver)
Community Manager – Hi-tech Channels (London)

CafeMom
Community Manager
Community Director

Edelman
Vice President Edelman Digital
Senior Vice President Edelman Digital

Hope Street Group
Web Manager

United Service Organizations
Director, Online Fundraising

If you'd like to post an open position, please go here. All jobs posted at Forum One Networks will remain on our website for 90 days and will also be included in the monthly Online Community Report newsletter.

Participating in the Social Media Ecosystem

nospam@example.com (Heather Virga) — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 18:31:44 -0500

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 content6% (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

Back to Basics: Want to Know What Community Members Need? Just Ask.

nospam@example.com (Bill Johnston) — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 17:37:10 -0500

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.

Online Community Unconference East - Early Bird Pricing Ends on January 11th

nospam@example.com (Heather Virga) — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 12:19:51 -0500

Our annual Online Community Unconference East is just over a month away. The event takes place on February 10th at the Digital Sandbox in New York City. The Online Community Unconference East is sponsored by Answers.com.

We expect to have 250 + people in attendance this year, making this the our largest east coast unconference yet. There will be 40-50 collaborative sessions on topics generated by the attendees. We have an awesome group of people attending including community and social media practitioners from Microsoft, Answers.com, Consumer Reports, Autodesk, Scottrade, TripAdvisor, CafeMom, Cisco, IBM, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, iVillage / NBC Universal, Rosetta Stone, Google, Harlequin Enterprises, The Humane Society of the United States, Scottrade, WEGO Health and more.

The early bird pricing of $145 ends on January 11th. Register here to take advantage of the early bird pricing: http://ocue2010-ocrn108.eventbrite.com

You can see pictures from the 2009 Unconference here.

OCU East 2009 Wiki

We have several sponsor opportunities open for this Unconference. If you are looking for a cost-effective way to reach NYC community and social media professionals, please contact Bill Johnston (bjohnston at forumone dot com) about our sponsorship options.

Please note: We ask non-sponsoring platform and service providers to register as such, and to pay the platform and service provider admission of $1,000. Charging non-sponsoring platform and service providers a higher rate helps us to ensure that attendees are mostly from brands developing their community and social media presences, and also helps us provide the best opportunity for our paying sponsors. This also allows us to (at least at this time) still allow non-sponsoring vendors to participate.

Back to Basics: The Strategy Team & Goal Definition

nospam@example.com (Bill Johnston) — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 14:16:05 -0500

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.

Current Research: Social Marketing Compensation Study

nospam@example.com (Heather Virga) — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 15:42:01 -0500

A few weeks ago, we announced our partnership with WOMMA. As part of our partnership, the Online Community Research Network (OCRN) and the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) are co-producing our first research study on Social Marketing professionals (marketers who focus on social media) compensation, job satisfaction, and team structure.

For the past two years, the OCRN has studied online community and social media professionals compensation. As social media continues to intersect with marketing tools, we'd like to study how social marketers are being compensated and how actively they are involved with online marketing.

If you're a marketing professional involved with social media, we'd like to invite you to participate in the Social Marketing Compensation survey.

The survey can be found here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/NYYK8BB

Things for participants to note:

-All participants will receive a participant version of the report, which includes aggregate data.
-All data will be processed and compiled in aggregate. Data will not be reviewed or presented in a personally (or company) identifiable way.

Please complete the survey before the end of the day on December 18th.

Feel free to email me with any questions: hvirga@forumone.com

Current Research: Participating in the Social Media Ecosystem

nospam@example.com (Heather Virga) — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 18:45:23 -0500

The Online Community Research Network is conducting our second study that examines how community and social media professionals engage in the social media ecosystem. Last April, 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 current Participating in the Social Media Ecosystem study is 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.

The research targets online community and social media executives, strategists, and managers, working both in the commercial and non-profit space.

The survey can be found here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/W3MT3ZL

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

-All participants will receive a participant version of the report, which includes aggregate data.
-All data will be processed and compiled in aggregate. Data will not be reviewed or presented in a personally (or company) identifiable way.

We would like to receive your responses by the end of the day Friday, December 11th, please.

Feel free to ping me if you have any questions: hvirga@forumone.com

Back to Basics: Developing an Online Community Strategy

nospam@example.com (Bill Johnston) — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 19:29:00 -0500

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:

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. Each article will be labeled "Back to Basics", and will be tagged #ocb2b

Online Community Unconference East - February 10, 2010

nospam@example.com (Heather Virga) — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 17:29:00 -0500

We're geaing up for our first event of 2010, the Online Community Unconference East, on February 10th in New York City. We expect 250-300 online community and social media professionals to attend -- making this our largest east coast unconference yet! Additionally, we expect to have 40-50 collaborative sessions.

Current attendees include: Cisco, IBM, The Humane Society of the United States, Answers Corporation, Medidata Solutions, Consumer Reports, Knowledge Alliance, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, CafeMom, CFA Institute, Impact Interactions, Optaros and more.

To register at the early bird rate of $145 ($195 after 1/10 edited to correct date) please go here: http://ocue2010-ocr1203.eventbrite.com

For an excellent summary of last years Online Community Unconference East, check out this Huffington Post article, An "Unconference" for Online Communities.

Last year's Unconference featured approximately 40 sessions on key topics including:

Best Practices - Busting the myths of online community management
The idea of the session was to drive discussions regarding many of the common ideas around community that have been published/promoted/blogged about as if they were absolutes rather than the experiences of a few.

Twitter for Business
A discussion of how different companies are using Twitter.

Best Practices for Content
Strategies and best practices for company and user-generated content.

Social Networking in the Enterprise
A discussion around how companies are using social networks and social media.

The Online Community Unconference East is being held at the Digital Sandbox in NYC, which is centrally located in the financial district and provides plenty of breakout space to support a full day of learning and fun. Lunch and snacks and WiFi will be provided.

You can see pictures from the 2009 Unconference here

OCU East 2009 Wiki

If you currently drive the community or social media strategy for your organization, and you are in (or will be in) the NYC area on 2/10, please join us for a highly energetic day of learning and collaborating.

We have several sponsor opportunities open for this Unconference. If you are looking for a cost-effective way to reach NYC community and social media professionals, please contact me about our sponsorship options.

Online Community and Social Media Jobs

nospam@example.com (Heather Virga) — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 16:49:35 -0500

As we get closer to the end of the year, many companies are actively seeking qualified community and social media pros to help them build, grow and manage their community and social media programs in 2010. Below you'll find a list of 14 jobs that are posted on the Forum One Networks website.

In addition to all of the job listings below, we wanted to highlight a new position that one of our clients is looking to fill. The position is for the Community Director of National Geographic's Animal Jam Community, an online community for kids aged 5-9. It's an exciting opportunity to build a new and innovative community that will launch in 2010. Go here for more information about the position.

National Geographic's Animal Jam
Community Director

Baptie & Company, Inc.
Community Manager – Hi-tech Channels

Knight Foundation
Social Media Superstar

Skyfire
Community Manager / Tech Evangelist & Support

Sonicbids
Designer
Director, Customer Engagement

Spiceworks
Community Manager

Test Yantra Software Solutions
Software Test Lead-Bangalore

TokBox, Inc
Community Evangelist

United Service Organizations
Director, Online Fundraising

WebMD.com
Online Community Moderator -- Freelance

Wikimedia Foundation
Chief Technology Officer

WorldWinner
Senior Community Moderator & Customer Services Representative

If you'd like to post an open position, please go here. All jobs posted at Forum One Networks will remain on our website for 90 days and will also be included in the monthly Online Community Report newsletter.

ReadWriteWeb's Guide to Online Community Management

nospam@example.com (Bill Johnston) — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 16:02:56 -0500

We announced our partnership with ReadWriteWeb in August of this year. One of the best resources we've seen from ReadWriteWeb this year is their Guide to Online Community Management, which is a great primer to the ins and outs of managing an online community. Editor Marshall Kirkpatrick and his team have sifted through massive amounts of information to cull out the most salient points and relevant sources for thinking about engaging in online community-building activities and getting started with online community management.

The Report Covers:

The Basics
The definition of an online community manager, assessing the need for community features on your site, and reasons for participating in the social media ecosystem (like Twitter & Facebook).

Do Startups Need Community Managers?
The blog post and comments that triggered the report: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/hiring_a_community_manager.php

ROI
Perspectives from the field, including Jeremiah Owyang and Joe Cothrel.

Job Description
A thorough exploration of the role of Community Manager, and key differences between the community role and more "traditional" roles like marketing and customer support.

The Marketing / Engagement Balance
A discussion of the convergence of activities for the Community Manger role.

Dealing with Challenging Community Members
How to deal with "problem" community members and how to redirect the negative energy.

Interviews with Community Managers
Including Dawn Foster and Lucia Willow

The report also lists a number of key online and in-person resources (including Forum One's Online Community Unconferences).

Online companion
One of the most innovative things about the report is the companion content site that curates the content streams from the contributors to the report in a one place.

If you are interested in purchasing the report, you may do so here.

Forum One Networks Partners with WOMMA

nospam@example.com (Heather Virga) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:21:33 -0500

Forum One is really excited to announce that we've partnered with the Word of Mouth Marketing Association. WOMMA is a coalition comprised of hundreds of top marketers who are learning how to encourage and amplify the natural phenomenon or word of mouth marketing, while respecting and protecting its honesty and integrity. Forum One's Online Community Research Network (OCRN) and WOMMA share common interests in that our goals are to build networks of professionals who collaborate on best practices, standards and metrics, and share knowledge among the professionals in our industries. In our partnership, we will promote each others professional groups, events, we will partner on industry research, and we'll cohost a webinar on a social media marketing topic in 2010.

Bill Johnston is currently attending WOMMA's Summit 2009 in Las Vegas, NV. The Summit feature experts from a variety of industries, who will discuss best practices, emerging trends and offer insight into how to word of mouth marketing buzz that extends beyond social media. If you aren't there this year, you can keep up on the buzz and conversations by following the Twitter stream #womma.

Online Community Expert Interviews: Vida Killian of Dell and Mari Kuraishi of GlobalGiving.org

nospam@example.com (Heather Virga) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 17:49:01 -0500

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.

The Ongoing Discussion Around Community and Social Media Compensation

nospam@example.com (Heather Virga) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 19:26:18 -0500

I've worked in a variety of industries in various marketing related roles, including: hardware, community, real estate, software, and now back to community and social media. I must admit, community and social media practitioners may well be the most passionate people I've ever worked with. Just attend any one of our events and you'll meet so many intelligent, motivated, solution-oriented people all in one space, sharing ideas, challenges and collaborating on solutions -- it's pretty amazing. Ironically, many people in the community and social media industry feel that they are under paid, under valued and under resourced, yet in the 2009 Online Community & Social Media Compensation report most respondents were somewhat satisfied or very satisfied with their jobs. I say it goes back to the passion and commitment that community and social media people have for the work they do. As the social media industry grows and companies identify the need for social media specific roles, they are looking to reports like the Online Community & Social Media Compensation report to help determine and set salary standards. However, the disparity in salaries leaves too much room for interpretation. Tom makes a really good suggestion for another way to communicate compensation the data in his post, Is There a Disconnect Between Social Media Job Descriptions and Compensation?. "For medium to large companies and established brands, the peaks on the high end make definite sense. The peaks on the low end are for non-profit and other volunteer-run communities and should not be included in the averages."

The Online Community & Social Media Compensation has started many conversations among the practitioners in the industry. I've included some of their posts below to get a flavor of the various opinions from the people in the field.

Men earn higher salaries in social media - Angela Connor
Online Community & Social Media Compensation - The Moderator Community
Social media salaries may not match the effort - Snoo.ws
How much do online community managers earn? - vator news
Is There a Disconnect Between Social Media Job Descriptions and Compensation? - Tome Humbarger
Social Media Salary Report: Ladies, It's Not Pretty - SocialMediaToday
#occomp09 - tweetmeme
Online Community & Social Media Staff: Satisfaction - OC Report
Online Community & Social Media Compensation - OC Report

The Online Community & Social Media Compensation report is on sale for only $99 until November 20th. The regular price is $349, so it's quite a deal!

If you have thoughts on the findings from the report, please share them.

Online Community & Social Media Staff: Satisfaction

nospam@example.com (Bill Johnston) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 22:08:26 -0500

In addition to studying compensation during our second annual Online Community & Social Media Compensation study (summary here), we also want to dig in to issues related the organizational environment that community and social media professionals work in. One key dimension is overall job satisfaction.

As part of the research, we asked the question: Please rate your overall job satisfaction?
Of the 370 respondents, most are "somewhat satisfied" with their jobs with an average satisfaction score of 4.1 and a median score of 4. The average satisfaction score was slightly less than last year’s score of 4.2. It is encouraging that while there is an economic downturn, the overall satisfaction with Online Community positions is well above average. This indicates the combination of salary, benefits, work environment and subject matter is working for most of the respondents. The economy can't be ignored as a major factor of influence on satisfaction scores, as a tough economic environment generally discourages folks from aggressively exploring new opportunities and tending to stay with existing positions.

The graphs below show data from the satisfaction questioned presented in a couple of ways: answers form our 2008 survey compared with 2009, and overall satisfaction compared between genders.

2008 Satisfaction vs. 2009

Satisfaction by Gender

As you can see from the graphs, average overall satisfaction was down slightly from 2008 to 2009. You can also see that women were less satisfied than their male counterparts.

A few write in answers from the report that add color to the graphs:

Unfortunately I feel that most companies are still unable to fully grasp the importance of a dedicated social media team. They do not see a direct correlation between social media and ROI, and therefore are hesitant to put as many resources (both people and money) into social media as is typically necessary. Granted, I was on the periphery of social media for the last three years while I was in graduate school; however since my graduation and re-immersion into social media, I haven't noticed much of a change. Most social media job postings are for intern positions.

I think, even still, a lot of organizations (executives and HR) don't understand what we do, and therefore tend to undervalue it. I was laid off from my previous job last year and although I found another job fairly quickly, compensation was a struggle. I ended up settling for less compensation than I wanted in order to get back in a job quickly.

Engagement with the online community and interacting with others in the field is the most rewarding part of my job.

Because community management is often rooted in customer support organizations, compensation tends to be determined relative to CSRs. In fact, more and more community managers play a critical role in shaping customer experience and ultimately brand, and their compensation needs to reflect that value in a way more commensurate with significant marketing roles.

Perhaps the only one other comment I would suggest is that the corporate world needs to understand that community building is a full time job and as such we need official job descriptions put together by HR that are aligned with the business needs as well as the personal career development opportunities from knowledge workers. Something we haven't even started to think about just yet!

Unless Online Community and Social Media is considered a valuable part of an organization and an intrical part of the overall customer touch processes, it won't get the resources and funds to grow. The value given directly correlates into the # of bodies dedicated to support it and the salaries that are paid.

On the one hand, community and social media professionals still seem very enthused about their jobs, and the emerging "social" industry. On the other hand, issues related to lack of standards on community and social roles, team structure, funding as well as difficulty showing financial ROI (in some cases) are clearly starting to cause fatigue.

What do you think? How satisfied are you in your community or social media role?

Social CRM Virtual Summit - November 11th, 2009

nospam@example.com (Heather Virga) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 18:56:29 -0500

We’re proud to be sponsors of Lithium’s online conference Social CRM on November 11th.

The Social CRM Virtual Summit is a five-hour online conference, which includes webcasts by industry leaders in an interactive exhibit hall, a resource center with extensive materials for download, and a virtual networking lounge to chat live with speakers and prospects. Bill Johnston will lead a session on Best Practices: Community, Strategy and Planning with Joe Cothrel of Lithium. Their session includes discussions on:

Defining and creating a community strategy by working with organizational and customer stakeholders to determine needs, goals and key influencers.
Determining what metrics are important to track, what is currently being measured against what many companies want to measure, and current key performance indicators, featuring research from the Online Community Research Network.
Defining the value of online communities through the key sources of value, including: cost reduction, lead generation, increased engagement, building customer loyalty.

5am to 10am PT / 8am to 1pm ET / 1pm to 6pm GMT, or
10am to 3pm PT / 1pm to 6pm ET / 6pm to 11pm GMT

Social CRM Virtual Summit Agenda

Webcasts by industry luminaries such as Mike Fauscette (IDC), Bill Johnston (Forum One), Jeremiah Owyang (Altimeter Group), and Ray Wang (Altimeter Group) in a virtual auditorium
Scheduled live chats with industry experts and practitioners from companies including Barnes and Noble, Lenovo, National Instruments, Redfin, Best Buy, Juniper Networks, and T-Mobile
An interactive exhibit hall with dynamic sponsor booths, including Genesys, ON24, Ant's Eye View, Forum One Communications, CRM Media, Cognizant, and Liveperson
A resource center with dozens of valuable white papers, podcasts, and presentations for download
A virtual networking lounge to meet other like-minded professionals through live chat
Keynote speeches from CRM thought leaders, Paul Greenberg (The 56 Group) and Brent Leary (CRM Essentials)

Go here to register for this free event and to see the complete agenda.

Report Back from the Online Community Summit 2009

nospam@example.com (Bill Johnston) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:04:43 -0400

Forum One hosted the eighth annual Online Community Summit 2009 last week in Sonoma, and by all accounts (and feedback) it was one of the strongest. We convened 70 online community experts to discuss important and timely topics including: community strategy, employees as social media advocates, "ideas" platforms, the growing importance of mobile and "operationalizing" social media.

I've included links to a few key content sources below. You will find a rich set of observations in the Twitter stream, as well as video interviews from 3 of our session leads.

Tweet stream from the Online Community Summit 2009
http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23ocs2009

Flickr stream:
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=ocs2009&w=all

Video Interviews:
Sharon Carothers of Legacy / BecomeAnEx.org

Jordan Williams of REI.com

Erica Kuhl of Salesforce.com

Online Community & Social Media Compensation

nospam@example.com (Bill Johnston) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 11:25:32 -0500

Last year, Forum One recognized that one of the key issues community and social media professionals face is that we (as an industry) are suffering from a lack of solid benchmarks, including compensation of online community and social media professionals. In July of 2008, as part of our ongoing research efforts with the Online Community Research Network, we conducted the first comprehensive study and gained valuable insight about online community and social media professional's compensation, team structure, and current job satisfaction.

In July of 2009, we launched the second annual Online Community & Social Media Compensation study, and received approximately 370 qualified responses. Participants represent a comprehensive sampling of organizations involved in building online communities, including: large software companies, large community destination sites, niche community sites, platform providers, media & entertainment, retail and independent consultants. A sample of the 300+ organizations that participated include (with their permission):
Answers Corp., Autodesk, Avid, Best Buy, Cartoon Network (Turner), Consumer Reports, Electronic Arts, hi5, IBM, KaBOOM!, Nokia, Quest Software, Sage Software, Seesmic, Sony Online Entertainment, The Knot, and Yahoo!

This year's report was truly global in scope, and included respondents from the USA, UK and Canada as well as Australia, Argentina, Spain, China, Costa Rica, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Sweden, Turkey and Ukraine.

Several key issues pertaining to online community and social media salaries surfaced during this report, including:
• The gap between the average male and female salaries widened, with male respondents averaging $86,644 (up from $85,423 in ’08) and Females averaging $75,624 (down from $77,319 in ’08).
• The majority of respondents reported a salary increase in 2009, but the percentage compared to last year was down, as was a significant increase in the number of respondents who took a salary decrease in 2009 compared to 2008.
• Average overall job satisfaction was down by a fraction, from 4.2 (out of 5) in 2008 to 4.1 (out of 5) in 2009.
• Several respondents mentioned feeling like they were being inadequately compensated because of lack of data available regarding community and social media salaries, as well as lack of understanding of community and social media ROI relative to their organization’s activities.

Demographics
Key demographic and background information about the respondents:
• The majority of the respondents are Female (52%) vs. Male (48%).
• The majority (77%) of respondents are from the USA.
• Most of the respondents have more than 5 years of experience, completed a Bachelors Degree, and work 41-50 hours per week.
• The majority of respondents work for a Profit Based Organization (85%) vs. Non-Profit (15%).

Industry

Years of Expereince

Work Environment

Location of Community Team
The majority of responses indicate their Community teams reside in the Marketing and Community departments. “No formal structure” and “Throughout the company” were also popular responses. The placement of the community team seems to be shifting to Marketing and Community departments. Last year 20% reported residing in the Marketing department and only 19% reported that they had their own Community department.

Hours Worked Per Week
Most of the respondents (45%) work 41-50 hours per week.

Percentage of Time Dedicated to Community & Social Media
Approximately three quarters of the respondents (73%) said that their job duties were not only comprised of working within the online community, and that a percentage of their time is dedicated to other areas within their organization.

Compensation
The average salary of the research participants, $81k, is the same as last year. The mean was $77.5k, which is $10k higher last year. As in 2008, there were peaks on both the low ($0-$25k) and high ends (more than $150k). There were also peaks and dips throughout the salary spectrum for 2009, including peaks for the following salary ranges; $50-55k, $65-$70k, $90-$95k and $100-$105k.

Salary by Gender
On average, the female participants earned an annual salary of $75.5k, which was slightly lower than last year’s $77k. At $86.5K, the male participant’s average annual salary is one percent higher than last year. The overall average annual salary for all participants was the same as last year’s $81k.

Salary by Region: USA
Respondents in the southwest region of the USA reported the highest average / median salary. The average salary for the southwest region was $99k with a median of $102k, which is significantly higher than last year’s average salary of $85k.

The second highest average / median salaries in the USA are in the northwest region. These respondents have an average salary of $87k, which is slightly less than the average annual salary of 2008. Within the northwest region, California had a higher average annual salary ($92k) than reported last year ($89k).

Even though lowest average / median salary in the USA was the same this year as last, the southeast region did have the largest reported average annual decrease compared with last year. This year the southeast region had an average annual salary of $46k, whereas last year it was 72k.

There were general peaks on the high ends (more than 150k) and low ends ($0-$25k) for all regions, except for the Midwest region, which dipped at the low end and remained even at the high end.

Satisfaction
The average satisfaction score was slightly less than last year’s score of 4.2. It is encouraging that while there is an economic downturn, the overall satisfaction with Online Community positions is well above average. This indicates the combination of salary, benefits, work environment and subject matter is working for most of the respondents. Although female and male participants mostly rated as being satisfied or somewhat satisfied with their jobs, the female participants are slightly more satisfied with their jobs than their male counterparts. The women had a higher percentage of rating in the somewhat satisfied category, whereas the men had a higher percentage rating for the somewhat dissatisfied category.

The Full Online Community & Social Media Compensation Report
The full 45 page report can be purchased here: http://store.onlinecommunityresearch.com/oncosomecosu.html
includes detailed information, analysis and charts on:
Participating organizations industry, size and history of community programs
Community Team Staff & Size
Education and experience of respondents
Compensation structures
Detailed benefits
Salaries
- Ranges
- Average by title
- Average by Gender, Age, Eduction
- Average by global location and USA Region
Salary Changes (Increase and Decrease)
Advice from many of the participants about factors that affect compensation, and the evolving roles and responsibilities of the online community team, the team's staff, and executives.

The tag for the Online Community & Social Media Compensation report is #occomp09.

Community Platform & Service Provider Research

nospam@example.com (Bill Johnston) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 23:38:56 -0400

The Online Community Platform and Services Satisfaction research report was published in March of this year as part of the ongoing efforts of the Online Community Research Network. The intention of the research project was to provide insight about customer attitudes towards online community platform and service vendors, particularly around satisfaction. Further, we wanted to explore the unmet needs in the online community platform and services market. The study had over 200 participants, and we gathered data on all major commercial and open source online community platforms, as well as feedback on custom built platforms. Key highlights from the research are covered in the slides below.

The full Online Communities: Platform and Services Satisfaction Report can be purchased here:
http://store.onlinecommunityresearch.com/oncoplandses.html

Online Community: Platform & Vendor Satisfaction

View more presentations from Bill Johnston.

The Real-time Web: A Short Reading List

nospam@example.com (Bill Johnston) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 12:24:00 -0400

A recent series of articles from ReadWriteWeb has spawned discussion here at Forum One of what impact the "real-time web" will have on online communities. Those conversations continue, but I wanted to share our short list of selected readings on the topic from the last 12 months.

Ken Fromm wrote the series of articles about the real-time web, and they can be found here:
The Real-Time Web: A Primer, Part 1,
The Real-Time Web: A Primer, Part 2,
The Real-Time Web: A Primer, Part 3

In the articles, he describes the collection of activities that describe the emerging Real-Time Web:

As with other recent waves of innovation (Web 2.0 and cloud computing, for example) there is no single definition of what the term "real-time Web" means. As a result, it is used as a catch-all phrase for a number of developments underway. At this point, we can identify that the real-time Web...:
1. is a new form of communication,
2. creates a new body of content,
3. is real time,
4. is public and has an explicit social graph associated with it,
5. carries an implicit model of federation.

Other recommended reading:

Google vs. The Real-Time Web
O'Reilly: The Real-Time Web

Real-Time Web Summit
Forum One is working with ReadWriteWeb to promote the Real-Time Web Summit in Mountain View on October 15th. I'll be there - will you? You can register here. Price is $195 until October 8th.

Online Communities: Metrics and Reporting 2009

nospam@example.com (Bill Johnston) — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 16:04:07 -0400

Updated 9/22/09.
The Online Communities: Metrics and Reporting research study was initiated in late July of 2009, and ran until the second week of August 2009. The research project was conducted by the Online Community Research Network, and the intention of the study was to get a broad look at what online community metrics organizations are tracking, how organizations determine and report on the ongoing value of their online community initiatives, and the reporting and metrics tools that help companies assess this.

We received approximately 175 responses. Participants represent a healthy swath of the types of organizations participating in online community culture. Participating industry categories include: software companies, hardware companies, consumer goods non-profit organizations, independent consultants and media companies, amongst others.

Report Highlights
Several key issues pertaining to online community and social media metrics surfaced during this report, including:

In general, organizations need to do a more thorough job of defining their business objectives for online community engagement, assessing ways to measure progress towards these objectives, reaching beyond their native platform metrics capabilities, and finding ways to measure the more qualitative components of community member engagement.
The Role of the Community Manager is increasingly important to developing and refining business process, and measuring performance in these new “social spaces.”
There is a growing need for community metric standards that are platform and vendor-independent.

Determining What to Measure
From Question 14: How does your organization determine what is important to measure and report?

SUMMARY:

20% (34) We stick with what the platform can provide
61% (100) We work from a strategy based on business goals and find solution to help us measure what we need
19% (31) We try to measure everything, will develop more of a strategy later

TAKEAWAY:
Respondents are primarily shaping metrics strategies based on business goals (61%), even if their platform doesn’t support gathering or tracking desired metrics. Platform metrics are generally speaking, not comprehensive or extensible enough to create a meaningful dashboard to see overall community health, get an accurate visualization of the community’s social graph, and to understand the ongoing insight created by and the sentiments of the community population. The risk in relying only on data that a platform can provide (20% of the respondents) is that the data sets aren’t comprehensive or contextual to organization’s needs. “Measuring everything” (19% of respondents) can overwhelm the community team and stakeholders, and is unlikely to yield meaningful performance data or insight without some rigor in the analysis.

Metrics Currently Being Tracked
From Question 16: What do you currently measure?

SUMMARY:
The top 5 items that online communities measure for tracking and reporting are as follows:

152 Responses - Unique Visitors
150 Responses - New Member Registrations
143 Responses - Page Views
126 Responses - Visitors
116 Responses - Message Posts

90 Responses - Member Satisfaction
90 Responses - Influencer / Evangelism
84 Responses - Member Life Cycle
83 Responses - Member Loyalty
73 Responses - Referrals to Community

Currently Measuring - Profit and Non Profit

http://www.onlinecommunityreport.com/images/metrics_tracked_2009_graph.png

Top 3 Key Performance Indicators

32% (74) User Activity / Engagement
21% (49) Membership Count [New Registrations, Active]
18% (42) Number of Posts / Comments
5% (12) Member Satisfaction / Loyalty
4% (10) Number of Questions Answered
4% (10) Sales Revenue - Up Sell, Cross Sell, Renewals
4% (8) Leeds / Referrals Generated
3% (6) Number of Downloads
3% (6) Number of Influencers / Evangelists
2% (5) Visitor Retention
2% (5) Number of Conversions
1% (2) Donations Received
1% (2) Visitor Geographic Dispersal

33 Number of Page Views / Clicks
22 Number of Site Visits
19 Number of Unique Visits

Access to the Full Report

please go here

The Online Communities: Metrics and Reporting 2009

available for purchase for $295

China and Social Networks

nospam@example.com (Editor) — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 23:59:58 -0400

The world's conversation is moving online. Every significant issue that people care about -- education, environment, development, health -- is debated and shaped on blogs, message boards and social networking sites. This is particularly true of global issues, since online conversations know no borders.

But there is one glaring absence in this new global conversation: China.

China blocks most international blogs, including any using popular blog services such as Wordpress or Blogger. China blocks any international URL with the word "blog" in it. China also blocks Twitter, Facebook, and many bulletin board sites. China currently does not block most news or information sites, but social sites are currently off limits.

This means that China is cut off from participating in the global conversation. At the very time when China is working hard to join the global community (all grade schools now teach English, among other things), Chinese have little opportunity to make their voices heard online.

This is a serious problem. Many current global issues pivot on China, including important financial, natural resource and environmental challenges. These issues will only be addressed through global cooperation and agreement. Much of that work is done online. But China isn't present.

Is there something the global online community could be doing to invite Chinese authorities to change policy and join the conversation? Is this best accomplished at the government to government level, or is there a grassroots strategy? Feel free to comment below.

Latest on the Online Community Summit, October 8-9 in Sonoma, CA

nospam@example.com (Heather Virga) — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 18:09:31 -0400

We’re just under four weeks away from our 8th annual Online Community Summit in Sonoma, CA, on October 8-9. We have a fantastic speaker and session line-up that I’ve detailed out below.

If you’d like to attend the Summit and you’re a senior online community or social media practitioner, please go here to request an invitation. There are limited tickets still available.

Please note: We restrict attendance of platform and service vendors to those sponsoring the event. If you would like information about sponsoring, please email me.

Check out the event site here for more information.

Event Schedule:

Thursday, October 8th

8:00 - 9:00: Registration / Breakfast

9:00 - 10:00: Introductions & Welcome
Bill Johnston – Chief Community Officer, Forum One Networks
Joi Podgorny – Head of Community, Mindcandy

10:00 - 11:00: Session 1 /Turning to the Crowd: Ideas and Contest Sites
How can you generate great ideas and enthusiasm for your organization at low cost?
Session Lead: Anil Rathi, Idea Crossing
Session Lead: Ryan Wilson, XPrize

11:00 - 11:30: Break

11:30 - 12:30: Session 2 / What You Need to Know About the Mobile Communities Revolution
As mobile usage explodes, the importance of mobile communities is increasing dramatically. We’ll review experiences from Obama to Armani to the American Cancer Society and demonstrate the coming wave of change that will impact your organization.
Session Lead: Kevin Bertram, Distributive Networks
Session Lead: Miles Orkin, America Cancer Society

12:30 - 1:30: Lunch

1:30 - 2:30: Session 3 / Social Marketing & Advertising
Communities and traditional forms of marketing and advertising have historically acted like oil and water. Progress is being made by innovative organizations that involve the community in feedback, permission-based programs and even advertising creation.
Session Lead: Paul Levine, Current.com
Session Lead: Bruce Smith, Answers.com

2:30 - 3:30: Session 4 / Break Out Sessions

3:30 - 4:00: Break

4:00 - 5:00: Session 5 / News Communities
While the importance of PR and marketing hasnʼt changed, the ways to influence major news sites has transformed radically. Weʼll discuss the news landscape and what it means for your organization.
Session Lead: Lila King – CNN.com
Session Lead: Chris Tolles – Topix.net

Friday, October 9th

8:00 - 9:00: Registration / Breakfast

8:00 - 9:00: Community and Good Ideas Demos (open podium)

9:00: Introductions

9:00 - 10:00: Session 6 / Social “ME”dia: Employees as Advocates
How does an organization combine employee passion with social media tools to meet organization goals?
Session Lead: Erika Kuhl, Salesforce.com
Session Lead: Lucia Willow – Pandora.com

10:00 - 11:00: Session 7: / Break Out Sessions

11:00 – 11:30: Break

11:30 – 12:30: Session 8: Operationalizing Social Media - Reshaping the Organization
As social media and community programs move form short term, tactical engagements to longer-term business strategies, organizations must transform to take full advantage of the possibilities. Hear about the topography of the “social organization” from our panel of experts leading the charge to transform their organizations via social media.
Panelists: TBA

12:30 - 1:00 Conference Close and Wrap up

Some of the current attendees include community and social media practitioners from leading companies including: Apple, GlobalGiving, Autodesk, Inc., Leadership Corps, Moshi Monsters, Edutopia, LinkedIn, American Legacy Foundation, SEGA of America, Time Inc. Lifestyle Digital, WestEd, TripAdvisor, Dell, Inc., Answers Corporation, Executive Networks, Inc., Microsoft, REI, Care2.com, Stupski Foundation, and The MathWorks, Inc.

Online Community Expert Interview: Angela Connor, WRAL.com

nospam@example.com (Bill Johnston) — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 10:36:00 -0400

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.

Online Community Summit 2009: Updates

nospam@example.com (Bill Johnston) — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 18:59:56 -0400

I wanted to post a quick update with the latest session leads and topics for the Online Community Summit, to be held October 8-9 in Sonoma.

I am looking forward to hosting the Summit, along with co-host Joi Podgorny, Head of Community at Mind Candy.

The current list of session topics includes:

Big Communities to Tackle Big Problems

Turning to the Crowd: Ideas and Contest Sites

What You Need to Know About the Mobile Communities Revolution

Social Marketing & Advertising

How Online Communities are Reshaping News

Social “ME”dia: Employees as Brand Advocates

Operationalizing Social Media - Reshaping the Organization

Session leads include:

Kevin Bertram, Distributive Networks

Sharon Carothers - Legacy

Austin Heap – Haystack

Lila King – CNN.com

Erika Kuhl - Salesforce.com

Paul Levine, Current Media

Miles Orkin, America Cancer Society

Bruce Smith - Answers.com

Hardy Wallace - Murphy-Goode Winery

Joi Podgorny – Head of Community, Mindcandy

Lucia Willow – Pandora.com

Ryan Wilson, XPrize

If you are a senior online community professional interested in participating in the Online Community Summit, and you haven't received an invitation, you may request one by writing me here.

Photos from last year's Summit:

Please note: We restrict attendance of platform and service vendors to those sponsoring the event. If you would like information about sponsoring, please drop me a note.

For more information about the Summit, you can check out the event site here.

Event tag is #ocs2009

Online Community & Social Media Compensation Survey 2009 Closes on 8/28

nospam@example.com (Heather Virga) — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 12:32:21 -0400

Forum One Networks Partners with Linqia's Moderator Community

nospam@example.com (Bill Johnston) — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 17:53:00 -0400

Forum One is very pleased to announce that we’ve partnered with Linqia's The Moderator Community. The Moderator Community is a gateway for community managers, group moderators and enthusiasts to connect with others and exchange knowledge, learn and ask questions. Our goal in partnering with the Moderator Community is to provide our readers with additional resources and a network of community professionals from around the world, in addition to our online community and social media research conducted through the Online Community Research Network (OCRN). This partnership will provide community professionals with an opportunity to connect, learn, and share best practices and community programs that are managed all over the world.

I have been especially excited about the possibility of working with The Moderator Community since hearing about the concept from Maria Sipka, CEO of Linqia and founder of the site.

Our partnership includes the following:

*Linqia will be the European representation for the Online Community Research Network (OCRN) and will be promoting our library of online community and social media research, conducted through the OCRN, which focuses on specific issues and topics in the online community and social media space. Some of our reports include: Online Community Metrics, Online Community ROI: Models and Reports, Social Media Ecosystems, Online Communities: Surviving & Thriving in the Downturn and more.

*The Moderator Community will give their social media guide (valued at $29.99) to all of the OC Report readers who become new members of their community. The social media guide includes advice on engaging in social media, with an emphasis on using social media for listening. It also features a categorized recommended reading list, a list of social media case studies, and a list of social media listening tools with explanations on each one.

*The Moderator Community and Forum One will co-host a free public webcast in the fourth quarter that delves into the most important and pressing issues that community and social media pros are facing.

*Forum One Networks and the OCRN will be featured sponsors of the Moderator Community and the Moderator Community will be featured as a sponsor of the Online Community Report Newsletter and a media sponsor at our Unconference Events.

We're really excited for the opportunity to work with the Moderator Community and look forward to building a more global representation of community and social media pros who will share ideas, challenges and solutions that represent the online communities around the world.

Forum One Networks Partners with ReadWriteWeb on Online Community Research

nospam@example.com (Bill Johnston) — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 14:52:19 -0400

Forum One Networks is thrilled to announce our partnership with ReadWriteWeb, a leading blog that provides Web Technology news, reviews and analysis (and is one of our favorite sites). This partnership allows us to collaborate with another organization that we highly respect, who is actively involved in the analysis and creation of online community resources. We particularly like (and recommend) ReadWriteWeb’s Guide to Online Community Management, which is a collection of case studies, advice and discussion concerning the most important issues in online community and a companion online aggregator that delivers the most-discussed articles each day written by experts on community management from around the web.

ReadWriteWeb is also partnering with us on our Online Community & Social Media Compensation research study, which means that we will reach many more online community and social media pros, making this the largest and most comprehensive study of online community and social media compensation to date. Go here to participate in the study: http://bit.ly/occomp09

We're ecstatic to be working with RWW (I'm a HUGE fan of their work), and look forward to the opportunities that this relationship holds.

Online Community Expert Interview: Chia Hwu, 23andMe

nospam@example.com (Bill Johnston) — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 12:27:21 -0400

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.

Social Media Ecosystems

nospam@example.com (Bill Johnston) — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 12:38:25 -0400

The Social Media Ecosystems research study was conducted by the Online Community Research Network in April of 2009. The study was created to provide insight about how organizations leverage external online community and social media sites to support their organizational goals.

We received approximately 60 completed surveys. Participants represent many sectors and markets including: large software companies, large community and social media destination sites, niche community sites, manufacturers, government and non-profits.

Report Highlights
We asked a range of questions about the use of external community and social media sites to support an organization's online presence. Among the findings:

A majority of respondents (26%) said that their community has existed for more than five years.

Of the high priority sites mentioned, five sites were mentioned as most important:
• Twitter
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• YouTube
• Second Life

The most important goal on ecosystem sites is to educate and inform followed by the goal of peer-to-peer evangelism.

Creating relationships between user and brand rated the most important activity followed by messaging and communicating timely information.

Most respondents are learning from current site participation and actively strategizing as they go along without a formal ecosystem plan in place.

Community managers or assistants are most often tasked with ecosystem site measurement.

More enhanced, direct communication is what respondents most value about ecosystem site participation.

The advice most given to peers was:
• Be efficient with process and measurement.
• Be responsive in communications to members/participants.
• Be authentic in the way you communicate and respond.

High Priority Social Media Sites
We asked participants to list the highest priority social media sites they maintain a presence on.

Of all the high priority sites mentioned, five sites were mentioned as most important. Those sites, and a snapshot of the organizations activities on those sites:
• 21 listed Twitter primarily for sharing information and building business relationships.
• 11 listed Facebook primarily for fan pages promoting company or brand.
• 5 entered LinkedIn for recruiting and client acquisition and retention.
• 3 use YouTube for sharing corporate videos including demos, game trailers and commercials.
• 3 use Second Life for health care support, meetings, recruiting and networking.

Priority Social Media Site: Twitter
Twitter was by far the highest priority social media touchpoint mentioned by the respondents.

Respondents mention using Twitter both personally and professionally (with both personal and "professional" accounts). Many users mentioned having more than 4 twitter accounts and personas.

Respondents mentioned using Twitter to:
• Listen / monitor sentiment, snapshot of current community "mood"
• Build business relationships
• Generate leads
• Support customers
• Connect with developers
• An extension of live chats and to keep people up to the minute
• Creating a network for event attendees
• Share news and marketing messaging
• Build awareness for their organization and cause
• Sharing online research re: community development
• Host events, such as the#gno Twitter party for women every Tuesday night

Note: The full report contains all of the write in data about Twitter, as well as Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and the other priority social media sites.

Social Media Strategy
The majority of our respondents have an existing online community destination they are hosting and managing. We have inferred from data collected in this study, as well as from interactions at our events and with client engagements, that have been slow to embrace social media participation because they have been primarily focused on increasing engagement on their respective, hosted sites. Participation in Twitter seems like the place many organizations start when they begin to experiment with creating a presence that includes hosted properties as as an extended social media presence. Not surprisingly, we found that a majority (66%) of respondent organizations do not have a comprehensive social media ecosystem strategy in place, as many are just beginning to experiment.

• 18% (10) replied yes.
• 56% (32) responded that they don’t need a formal plan.
• 16% (9) said that a formal, comprehensive plan is currently being written.
• 10% (6) replied no.

The Social Media Ecosystem report, which includes full results and all write in answers can be purchased on our research store:
http://store.onlinecommunityresearch.com/

Online Community Expert Interview: Ron Casalotti, BusinessWeek

nospam@example.com (Bill Johnston) — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 11:14:44 -0400

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.

Online Community Summit 2009 - Initial Topics & Session Leads

nospam@example.com (Bill Johnston) — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 16:40:39 -0400

The Online Community Summit will be held October 8th & 9th in Sonoma, CA. It is hard to believe that the Online Community Summit is now in it's eight year!

The Summit was originally convened by Jim Cashel of Forum One in October of 2001 as a unique invitation-based event, bringing together thought leaders from business, government, finance, academia and the media, who despite different positions share a keen interest in online group collaboration. Each year we gather a select group of senior online community professionals to discuss topics addressing business strategy, emerging technologies, key trends, as well as many tactical issues during the breakout sessions.

This year, I will be hosting the Summit, along with co-host Joi Podgorny, Head of Community at Mind Candy. Joi is an online community expert with areas of expertise in virtual worlds and online experiences for children.

What makes the summit so special?
In short: the people, the conversations, and the location. The Summit is attracts senior and knowledgeable online community experts from the commercial and non-commercial sectors. Our session format is structured in a very unique way, in that two expert session leads present 30 minutes of prepared comments, followed by a facilitated discussion with the attendees. The location of the Summit is Sonoma, California, a nexus of world class food, wine and leisure. In addition to sampling the best ideas in community and social media, we will be sampling the fruits of Sonoma Valley with outstanding food, wine and socializing on the beautiful ground of Ramekins Culinary Academy and the Sonoma Plaza.

A Few of the session topics:

Turning to the Crowd: Ideas and Contest Sites

What You Need to Know About the Mobile Communities Revolution

Social Marketing & Advertising

How Online Communities are Reshaping News

Social “ME”dia: Employees as Brand Advocates

Session leads include:

Kevin Bertram, Distributive Networks

Lila King – CNN.com

Erika Kuhl - Salesforce.com

Paul Levine, Current Media

Miles Orkin, America Cancer Society

Bruce Smith - Answers.com

If you are a senior online community professional interested in participating in the Online Community Summit, and you haven't received an invitation, you may request one by writing me here.

Please note: We restrict attendance of platform and service vendors to those sponsoring the event. IF you would like information about sponsoring, please drop me a note.

Event tag is #ocs2009

Online Community: Compensation Study

nospam@example.com (Bill Johnston) — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 15:54:57 -0400

Update 8/11/09:
You can participate in the 2009 compensation study here: bit.ly/DqWi4
---

The Online Community Compensation study was initiated in July of 2008 as part of our ongoing research efforts with the Online Community Research Network. The intention of the study was to get a broad look at online community compensation, factors that effect compensation, and the current environment of the community team and community staff roles.

We received approximately 225 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.

Key findings from the report:
• The majority of the respondents are: Female (55%) vs. Male (45%),
• The majority (61%) of respondents ranged in age from 31-50 years of age.
• Most of the respondents have more than 5 years of experience, completed a Bachelors Degree, and work 41-50 hours per week.
• The average Salary of the respondents was $81k with a median of $72.5k. There were peaks on both the low ($0-$25k) and high ends (more than $150k), and then also at $60-$65k.
• Women are earning only 91% of what men are earning; women averaged $77k, and the men averaged $85k. The average annual salary for all participants was almost $81k.
• Most participants are satisfied with their jobs with an average satisfaction score of 4.2 and a median score of 4 (on a scale of 1-5).

Gender
This is the first time we have asked a gender question in our research, but this answer, combined with anecdotal data from our events supports a slight tendency towards females being in community roles vs. males.

Age
Most of the particpants skewed towards the 31-40 y/o segment.

Department
The responses indicate Marketing “owning” Community teams, or organizations creating a dedicated team. “No formal structure” and “Throughout the company” were also popular responses. The placement of the community team seems to be very much in flux, with a bias towards the marketing department.

Experience
The respondents generally represented a senior and seasoned body of practitioners. The dip in responses in the 3yr to 5 yr range likely represents the general waning of interest in online community during the 3 years after the Internet bubble, and the relatively recent resurgence in interest and investment.

Salary
The average Salary the research participants was $81k with a median of $72.5k. There were peaks on both the low ($0-$25k) and high ends (more than $150k), and then also at $60-$65k. The salaries reported represent a disparate, but generally healthy, range. Spikes in the “$0 to $25k” can be accounted for by volunteers, part time staff and C-level staff not currently taking compensation in startup environments.

Salary by Gender
Women are earning 91% of what men are earning; women averaged $77k, and the men averaged $85k. The average annual salary for all participants was almost $81k.

Satisfaction
It is encouraging to find that overall satisfaction with Online Community positions is well above average. This indicates the combination of salary, benefits, work environment and subject matter is working for most of the respondents.

Full Report
The full Online Community Compensation report contains a good deal more information on the topic, including:
• Community team size
• Respondent education
• Hours Worked
• Benefits
• Salary by Country (US, UK, Canada)
• Salary by Title
• Salary by Experience
• Salary increases in last 12 months
• Full write in comments from Survey

The report available for free to members of the Online Community Research Network, or available to purchase for non-members here:
Online Community Compensation 2008

Managing Negative Influences on Community Culture

nospam@example.com (Bill Johnston) — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 17:25:20 -0400

This post is part of the #OCTribe series, intended to spark discussion amongst community practitioners on a bi-monthly topic. This week's "call to post" was initiated by Scott Moore:
The Aug 11 Topic: Fostering culture in and around online communities

I wanted to touch on negative influences of Online Community culture, and hopefully shed some insight in to how to manage these influences. This post is based on our Online Community Culture study in October of 2008, which is part of the ongoing research agenda of the Online Community Research Network. The intention of the study was to get a broad look at the factors that influence online community culture, and the steps community managers and strategists take in cultivating, and in some cases influencing, a community’s culture. We had over 75 participants in the research, representing many sectors, including software, tech, traditional media, social media and online community, and non-profits. Respondents seniority skewed towards Manager (44%), Directors & VP's (12%).

What issue can have the most negative impact on a community's culture?
From the research responses, we found the following to have the most negative effect on an online community's culture:

Negative Content: The issue that most respondents said would have a negative impact on the community culture was related to content 25% (12) (negative content, irrelevant content or no content), trolls and spammers.

Host Involvement: Host Involvement was also a commonly reported issue, including lack of host involvement 14% (7) and over controlling host 10% (5). It is an important factor, it seems from the responses we received, for hosts to tread the fine line of properly representing and supporting a community.

Member Feedback: Another issue that was said to have a negative impact was a failure to respond to member’s comments and concerns 6% (3), and to actively cultivate and make use of member’s feedback 6% (3).

Other important issues that could have a negative impact on a community’s culture are lack of member participation 14% (7), lack of trust 10% (5), excessive moderation (3), lack of consistency (2) and poor user interface (2)

A graph of the most common write in responses:

Select write in responses about the different factors that negatively affect community culture:

Negative Community Content:

“"me too" posts, posts that waste people's time.”

Librarian, Non-Profit Organization

“Unprofessional actions including but not limited to, trolling, personal attacks, and disruptive behavior.”

Community Program Manager, Software Company

“Allowing negative attitudes without chiming in to encourage more positive interactions, also not responding to member’s complaints.”

Community Manager, Tools / Service Provider

Host Involvement:

“There are actually two issues that can negatively impact a community's culture: 1) too much involvement by the host organization (corporate politics or the host organization doing things it feels are important, not what the community views as important or needed) and 2) not enough involvement by the host organization (not listening to and responding to member's concerns, ideas and suggestions). There is a fine line that must be found in order to properly represent and support a community. And this is a challenge for many host organizations.”

Community Manager, Online Community / Social Media Company

“Being disingenuous in your interactions with the community culture (you will get busted), or otherwise pulling the blinds after you've made the effort to provide transparency.”

Director, Online Marketing & Community Development

“Short of the host going belly up and shutting off the servers? Lack of, or inconsistent, communication from the community host. This strips the feeling of control or impact on can have on their community which leads to less investment which leads to weaker communities. Trolls and spam can be disruptive, but they are only destructive when the hosts are absent, ineffective or inconsistent in supporting the values of the community.”

Independent Consultant, Consultancy

Ignoring Member Feedback:

“Failure of the host company to respond to it's members. Failure to listen and respond to their comments. When we work with our members on changes to the site, some ideas can get expensive. We explain that we're bootstrapped and , although we love the idea, can't do it at this time. They understand. But to ignore it or just say 'no' would set the wrong tone. Honesty with our members has a tremendous upside.”

Co-founder, Online Community / Social Media Company

Lack of Trust:

“Lack of trust in the reputation of its members”

Online Community Strategist, Media Company

Excessive Moderation:

“Inexperienced (overzealous) moderator intervention, particularly in response to external pressures (a spammer, a "too-salesy" vendor post, perceived threat from other communities, etc.).”

Analytics Country Manager, Agency

Poor User Experience:
“Bad user experience can kill a community incredibly quickly - doesn't matter if the community is online or physical, bad experience brings it to a stop”
Community & Education Marketing Manager, Software Company

Creating a Positive Culture:
It's clear from the research (and the write in comments) that a few key factors to prevent or manage the negative influences are:

Be a good host - Ensure a clean, well lit place from a user experience perspective. Be present in the community, and participate in the community. BE transparent about your intentions for hosting the community, and about any changes or updates to the community and to any policies or guidelines.

Be clear about policy - Post behavior guidelines prominently, and ensure that are easily understood. Educate members by example by your actions as well as highlighting examples of positive behavior and contribution.

Be even about moderation - Be consistent in enforcing moderation guidelines, and keep visible punitive action to a minimum.

Listen. Then listen some more - create as many channels of feedback as you can manage, including forums, feedback email alias and soliciting feedback via regular satisfaction surveys. As important as listening? Ensure the community feels heard by acknowledging the feedback. Even if you can't respond to every email (really?), you can regularly post answers to questions or feedback you have gotten.

We want to hear from you
What are your thoughts? Did we miss any of the negative influence factors? What suggestions do you have for preventing or managing negative community influences?

Recap: Valuing Participation in Online Communities

nospam@example.com (Bill Johnston) — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 23:40:17 -0400

Last week we announced the 2nd topic in the #octribe discussion: Valuing Member Participation and Contribution in Online Communities.

From the "Call to Post" last week:

" Admittedly, this topic is a bit of a double edged sword: Assigning financial value to online community member participation and contribution.

On one hand, a community manager could can paint a compelling portrait of value for internal stakeholders by determining a financial value to member participation (assistant moderate, guiding discussions, welcoming new members, etc.) and assigning value to member contributions (support forum posts, tutorials, reviews, feedback and ideas).

On the other hand, if an organization were to make the valuations of member participation and contribution public, it would likely set off a firestorm of debate about member compensation, legal boundaries around "volunteer opportunities", and ultimately, force the host organization to account for true cost and true value of the activities and content created in their online community.

It seems clear that it would be useful for organizations to have at least notional values for member contributions and participation. What is less clear is how (if at all) to talk about this value with the community, and how (if at all) social capital is exchanged for financial capital in online communities.

Several folks participated in the discussion, and had perspectives on how, if and why to measure and quantify the value of member participation.

Here is what the #octribe community had to say:

@martinreed

"The value of participation in a community should be measured by its effect on brand perception, equity and aspirations. #oct"

@SueOnTheWeb

"If cmty is displaying cpm Ads, financial value of member contributions would be each page view = Ad displayed = Revenue generated. #octribe"

Value and Community Behavior Metrics: “Behavior Stoppages?” - Connectible Dots

"His big question: “What is the arbitrage between social and financial capital?” I don’t have an answer, but I do have a further question. Even if all of the rewards are experiential, and nothing looks like compensation, could an organized community that knows about metrics and valuation of a business do a “behavior stoppage” of desired activities as protest against a company action? Valuing behavior like work could extend the work metaphor in directions beyond the company’s valuation. “Interesting” organized group dynamics are possible too.

Create value metrics for both host and community - PHOOM!

"Some discussion of assigning value to members in a community tend toward how valuable a particular community member is to the host of the community (be they a brand, reseller, or even non-profit). This often raises concerns that community members are being taken advantage of. The AOL volunteer lawsuit gets thrown out as one of the third-rail types of stories -- danger! do not touch! What is often lost is that AOL ran volunteer programs for a long time before the lawsuits with few issues. What changed? Part of the answer is that AOL was using free access as a perk for their volunteers. However, when AOL went from a rated service (access charged by the hour) to a flat-rate (unlimited access for a monthly fee), the value of that perk plummeted. It's not the whole reason some volunteers stood up against AOL, but it certainly added to some of the resentment."

..."but I challenge my fellow community managers and facilitator. What other kinds of positive feedback loops can we create that build value for different aspects of our communities such that even if the value were quantified as a number, people would still be willing to contribute?"

The value of volunteers - Confessions of a Community Junkie blog

"Here at Novell, volunteers answer forum questions, create and share technical documents, participate in beta testing, etc. etc. Everyone that reports a bug or makes a suggestion is a volunteer...it's just all a matter of scale. The value of all volunteer contributions could be very, very, very roughly estimated by equating forum answers to technical support calls, technical doc contributions to documentation, etc. but then not every forum post would be a support call and every document submitted wouldn't be written by the documentation department. What can you equate a bug report or beta participation to? Also, you should ask what is the value of a forum post or a blog entry when the interactions are not one-to-one but one-to-many or many-to-many where multiple parties benefit over an extended period of time?

The bottom line is that any attempt to put a dollar figure to volunteer contributions in a complex business environment would be spending a lot of time to come up with that rough estimate.

Like documentation, you know it's critical, you know it has value, you know you would lose customers without it, but you can't know the dollar figure in indirect revenue it brings to the company. You do it because you know it DOES have value as a cost of doing business."

If you posted on the #octribe topic, and I missed your post, please let me know. Also, if this discussion spawns any reactions or further thinking, please let me know that as well. The intention is to keep the conversation going!

Valuing Participation in Online Communities

nospam@example.com (Bill Johnston) — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 18:07:56 -0400

I'm pleased to be kicking off the 2nd topic in the #octribe discussion, following the kickoff topic of "Influencers" by Gail Williams two weeks ago.

How OCTribe works
Write something tomorrow (Tuesday, July 28), tag it #octribe or tweet it as #octribe, and your post will be linked from the recap page. Moving forward, each 2nd Tuesday and 4th Tuesday of the month, the call and the recap will be hosted on the site of another one of the bloggers in the loosely defined OCTribe group. This conversational project is just starting, so please join in!

The Topic: Valuing Member Participation and Contribution in Online Communities
Admittedly, this topic is a bit of a double edged sword: Assigning financial value to online community member participation and contribution.

On one hand, a community manager could can paint a compelling portrait of value for internal stakeholders by determining a financial value to member participation (assistant moderate, guiding discussions, welcoming new members, etc.) and assigning value to member contributions (support forum posts, tutorials, reviews, feedback and ideas).

On the other hand, if an organization were to make the valuations of member participation and contribution public, it would likely set off a firestorm of debate about member compensation, legal boundaries around "volunteer opportunities", and ultimately, force the host organization to account for true cost and true value of the activities and content created in their online community.

It seems clear that it would be useful for organizations to have at least notional values for member contributions and participation. What is less clear is how (if at all) to talk about this value with the community, and how (if at all) social capital is exchanged for financial capital in online communities.

The questions I would like to explore in this #octribe series are (feel free to pick one, all or explore your own!):
• Do you currently assign an internal financial value to member contributions and participation?
• Do you use an assumed value as part of your communities ROI reporting?
• Do you account for social capital in your system of accounting for online communities?

Reading the following article from forbes (2001) spawned the "participation value" question for me. In the article, staff writers sketched the value of the cost savings AOL benefited from via their volunteer program.

http://www.forbes.com/asap/2001/0219/060s02.html

"How much has AOL saved by using volunteer labor during the past nine years? That's not an easy question, and with AOL involved in litigation, the company is not eager to furnish the answer. But even with the most conservative numbers available, we estimate that by using volunteers AOL escaped nearly $973 million in expenses since going public in 1992. That poses the question: Would AOL have thrived-or even survived-on Wall Street without free help from volunteers during its first seven years as a public company? Not likely.

The many jobs that volunteers have performed for AOL would be compensated at a wide range of hourly rates in the labor market (see story). To be safe, we used a conservative figure of $15 per hour-about equal to that of a security guard-as the median salary for today's AOL volunteers. We adjusted the hourly rate backward using an annual rate of inflation of 4% (historical note: Inflation hasn't been as high as 4% since mid-1991). For the purpose of the model, each volunteer is assumed to have worked 10 hours per week, 50 weeks a year."

Please note that I am including the article because it is one example of valuing member participation.

So, to wrap up:
• Please post your thoughts on valuing member participation on Tuesday, July 28th
• Tag the posts and any related tweets as #octribe
• I'll compile a wrap up post that includes all tagged posts by the end of the week

If you have any questions, please email me.

Online Community Expert Interview: Dawn Lacallade, SolarWinds

nospam@example.com (Bill Johnston) — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 18:12:51 -0400

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.

Community Influencer Programs

nospam@example.com (Bill Johnston) — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 16:31:59 -0400

Note: This post is part of the OC Tribe series. Each 2nd Tuesday and 4th Tuesday of the month, online community practitioners will be encouraged to explore a particular topic via blog, video blog, twitter, or whatever suites your fancy. The recap will be hosted on the site of another one of the bloggers in the loosely defined OCTribe group. This ad-hoc group (movement?) is just starting up, so please join in!

Today's topic is the role of influential members in online communities. In the kickoff post, Gail Williams asks

"Who in your communities is an influencer of others? As a facilitator, moderator or community manager, how do you work with the most influential people in your network? As a designer, how would you accommodate the opinion leaders? Got three top tips for rewarding these valued members of a group?"

The Online Community Research Network studied this topic as part of the "Online Community Marketing, Growth and Engagement" report, published in July of 2008. At the time, Elite / Influencer programs were not a priority, and were generally being handled in an informal way. There were several reasons for this, including lack of executive support, overhead with finding and qualifying members, and the legal implications with having an “elite” or privileged tier:

“The real answer is that we don’t have much of an Elite program yet. We have started in the last 18 months to do some things, but haven’t yet gotten much participation. There are some legal reasons why we haven’t really done much so far. Go back and look at AOL. We’d like to find ways around the legal”

The case that the survey respondent was referring to was Greenberg vs. AOL (2001) which involved volunteer moderators suing AOL for back wages. To our knowledge, legal issues regarding influencer programs, and the related compensation, rewards or special privileges are still being approached on a case by case basis for organizations with programs.

Organizations that were attempting to identify influencers and elites stated:
• It is easy to identify influencers and elites because they tend to be easy to spot and they stand out from the crowd due to the amount of time they spend on the community and the amount of content they create or post.
• Others said it is all about relationship and knowing the people who are participating in the community and engaging them directly.
• A minority of people use algorithms and metrics to identify the influencers.
• One person stated they manually tabulate the postings that each participant makes each week.

Various tactics for engaging influential members included:
• Having Moderator contact the influencers directly via email.
• Providing extensive training and support.
• Highlight / celebrate influential community members in different ways on the web site.
• An escalation procedure and incentives (sometimes monetary) for converting members into subject matter experts, featured editorialists and/or ambassadors (geographic).
• I would recognize them in newsletters and on the website; send them a gift branded with our logo; quarterly send them something more expensive like an iPod.
• We increase the features available to these members for no charge.
• After the existing team has voted 100%, we approach a candidate with an offer to join in the decision-making group.

The write in answers from the study offer more insight:

Easy to Spot / They Stand Out (10):
• I have no methodology other than a feel for who is there most often, and who is listened to and respected by others.
• Influencers on our site are easy to spot - they have the most activity in submissions, Diggs and comments.
• Those who are comfortable with technology will be most likely to post and respond; therefore they will stand out in the community.
• Listen, track the people who are most interested and demonstrate that interest by spending a lot of time, posting a lot, etc. Then, most importantly, once we identify them and make contact, we provide pretty extensive training and support. Show them we really appreciate their support and want them to succeed within our community.
• We will probably start with those who actively engaged with our content -- live events. Online courses, newsletters and seek out ways for getting them to engage with our content online.
• We are an online children's game and we can easily identify the influencers by their levels in the game - so, no words of wisdom there, sorry.
• Monitor discussion
• Directly. Just ask. It's really that simple. Find the decision maker...keep it short and show what is in it for them and let the rest take its course.
• Tracking activity and having Moderator contact the influencers directly via email.
• Scan participation for quantity and quality of posts.

Relationships (5):
• The full team develops personal relationships with influencers and elites. They are also highlighted / celebrated in different ways on the web site, but I believe the personal relationship is the key engagement.
• I know them all by heart.
• Facilitators know who the most active contributors on their communities are.
• The community staff is part of the community so they recognize these people and through contact with them on the chat channels build up trust.
• Editors have connections to various "experts" that they've asked to be guest bloggers. We've had some success with this.

Use Algorithms & Metrics (4):
• We have algorithms for automatically identifying who is contributing lots of content, and the rating tools go into helping us identify who is doing interesting contributions. We also do "calls" for specific content and then comb through the submissions. We then have an escalation procedure and incentives (sometimes monetary) for converting members into subject matter experts, featured editorialists and/or ambassadors (geographic).
• Our platform has a member rank algorithm built into it, so we can easily see who's among the top members according to total posts, quality (overall rating) of posts, and return visits to the community.
• Use metrics to see number and source of contributions and comments.
• We rank individuals for non-elite program means, using proprietary calculations, using a complex formula, including simple things like traffic, to very complex things like social network analysis (proprietary versions of centrality, between-ness, etc.)

Manually-tabulated Metrics (1):
• Unfortunately the platform we used did not have a recognition system, so I would have to manually tabulate postings for the week and key contributors/rated content. I would recognize them in newsletters and website under "Member Spotlight" where there was a printed Q&A with them, I would then send them a wireless kit that was branded with our logo and quarterly would send them something more expensive like an iPod. I then went from posting their interview to podcasting their interview and this would be posted on the website, in the forum, on newsletters, and anywhere else that was appropriate.

Community Volunteers (3):
• We have a team of volunteers that manage the communities. They are all active participants within the community and often they are the influencers. By being moderators and administrators they get the respect of their peers. We also identify the influencers and elites of our communities through automated metric and manual account reviews and on some sites we increase the features available to these members for no charge (where other members have to pay for these upgrades).
• We provide a lot of hands on support to the volunteer leaders of our 50+ networks.
• The community itself promotes users to moderator or admin status, existing moderators and admins set policy for the forums and administer sanctions. All moderators/admins can nominate a user for promotion to the admin team. All moderators /admins can veto any suggestion. To be taken into the admin team at any level requires 100% positive vote from the existing team and the community manager. The team then approaches the candidate with the offer to join in the decision making group.

Additional Resources:
Two programs that come up regularly in our research as target models are the Yelp Elite and Microsoft MVP programs.

Yelp Elite
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/05/27/understanding-community-leadership-an-interview-with-a-member-of-yelps-elite/

Microsoft MVP
http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/
http://www.socialtext.net/ocu2007/index.cgi?engaging_influencers_through_recognition_programs=

Influencer Session Notes from Unconferences past:
http://www.socialtext.net/ocu2008/index.cgi?managing_entitlement_wrangling_with_the_elite_noisy
http://www.socialtext.net/ocu2009/index.cgi?identifying_and_engaging_with_online_influencers

Online Community Ecosystems: Slides + Diagrams

nospam@example.com (Bill Johnston) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:58:02 -0400

I'm often asked about my online community ecosystem diagrams when I include them in a presentation, like the June 17th Online Community Health webinar. I've put together a little care package for those of you that would like to use or extend the diagrams and slides.

Below you will find links to a PowerPoint deck that includes several versions of the ecosystem diagrams, as well as an OmniGraffle diagram that can be modified to fit your circumstances.

The only thing I ask as that you: a. provide attribution to the source and b. let me know what modifications or extensions you make.

Ecosystems PowerPoint source file

Ecosystems OmniGraffle source file

Preview of Ecosystem slides:

View more documents from Online Community Research Network.

Online Community Report

Unconference East: Moving Forward, Together

Social Media Week February 1-5

Why You Should Sponsor the Online Community Unconference East

Online Community Expert Interview: Rawn Shah, IBM

What to expect at the Online Community Unconference East

Announcing Community Manager Appreciation Day

Online Community and Social Media Jobs

Participating in the Social Media Ecosystem

Back to Basics: Want to Know What Community Members Need? Just Ask.

Online Community Unconference East - Early Bird Pricing Ends on January 11th

Back to Basics: The Strategy Team & Goal Definition

Current Research: Social Marketing Compensation Study

Current Research: Participating in the Social Media Ecosystem

Back to Basics: Developing an Online Community Strategy

Online Community Unconference East - February 10, 2010

Online Community and Social Media Jobs

ReadWriteWeb's Guide to Online Community Management

Forum One Networks Partners with WOMMA

Online Community Expert Interviews: Vida Killian of Dell and Mari Kuraishi of GlobalGiving.org

The Ongoing Discussion Around Community and Social Media Compensation

Online Community & Social Media Staff: Satisfaction

Social CRM Virtual Summit - November 11th, 2009

Report Back from the Online Community Summit 2009

Online Community & Social Media Compensation

Community Platform & Service Provider Research

The Real-time Web: A Short Reading List

Online Communities: Metrics and Reporting 2009

China and Social Networks

Latest on the Online Community Summit, October 8-9 in Sonoma, CA

Online Community Expert Interview: Angela Connor, WRAL.com

Online Community Summit 2009: Updates

Online Community & Social Media Compensation Survey 2009 Closes on 8/28

Forum One Networks Partners with Linqia's Moderator Community

Forum One Networks Partners with ReadWriteWeb on Online Community Research

More on our Partnership with ReadWriteWeb

Online Community Expert Interview: Chia Hwu, 23andMe

Social Media Ecosystems

Online Community Expert Interview: Ron Casalotti, BusinessWeek

Online Community Summit 2009 - Initial Topics & Session Leads

Online Community: Compensation Study

Managing Negative Influences on Community Culture

Recap: Valuing Participation in Online Communities

Valuing Participation in Online Communities

Online Community Expert Interview: Dawn Lacallade, SolarWinds

Community Influencer Programs

Online Community Ecosystems: Slides + Diagrams