Photo cred: http://www.flickr.com/photos/skinnyde/146763376/

The sacred cows I mention below have been on my mind for several months now, but I was inspired to take action after a community management panel that I attended at SxSWi. My intention with this post is not to suggest that we do away these sacred cows, but to start to be critical of them. I fear that these 3 cows, in particular, are being accepted as gospel, and those new (and not so new) to online community building really don’t challenge them.

As with many good things gone wrong, these cows all began with good intentions.

Cow #1: You don’t own the community, the community owns the community
Original intention: To stop (mostly brand) community hosts from being overly-controlling of the community, and being too directive of community interactions.

Why this cow should be challenged: No ownership = absolution of responsibility, and weak or no long term stewardship. The host *does* own parts of the community experience, and certainly has the responsibility to create a virtual “clean, well-lit place” for their brand or organization. Perhaps a better cow would be: “You don’t own the community, but you have a responsibility to be a good host, leader and listener”. Speaking of listening…

Cow #2: Start by listening

Original intent: Listening was an easy (and fairly passive) way to get brands and organizations familiar with the social web.

Why this cow should be challenged: Ok, this one isn’t necessarily bad, just a bit misguided. My recommendation to clients is to start with a conversation about your goals for engaging on the social web. A listening strategy is key to managing a successful online presence, but brands and organizations also need to interact. Another disturbing trend I see with “just listening” is that some brands are wholesale farming out listening and interaction to their agency of choice, as opposed to creating direct brand to customer or organization to stakeholder relationships.

Cow #3: Go where your community is

Original intent: Don’t just buy a platform and expect your community to show up – (a.k.a. Build it and they will come).

Why this cow should be challenged: Many organizations are doing a poor job of evaluating the opportunity for community on their own domain, and are setting up outposts on large social sites like Facebook because it is relatively easy and (initially) inexpensive. In our “Participating int he Social Media Ecosystem” research project from January of 2010, we saw that only about 1/2 (56%) of the participants had a comprehensive social strategy in place – meaning, only 1/2 of the organizations had spent time assessing and researching where their community currently was, and the opportunities for on and off domain engagement.

Assuming that the best place to engage members of your online community is offsite (say, a Facebook fan page) is probably a big mistake, and a lost opportunity to help transform a static corporate site into a more social experience.
Those are my top 3 Sacred Cows. What do you think? And, more importantly, what are yours?

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

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

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

The topics we are exploring in this project include:

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

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

The tag for this research project is: #socstrat

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

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

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

Most community strategies have traditionally focused on the hosted properties of the organization. The reality is that there is an ever expanding universe of online touchpoints that an organization’s community members are participating in off-domain. An ecosystem research exercise should be conducting as part of a strategy development (or strategy course correction) exercise in order to discover where the off domain centers or activity are, and who the most vocal and active participants are. The discovery exercise is essentially an audit of the current community ecosystem, including customer, prospect, partner and competitor touch points. This information will help establish a baseline of market-oriented sites and activity, which will be important to understand the opportunities for new community activity by your (or your client’s) brand.

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

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

Where Should You Look?
Using tools like Google Blog Search, Twitter Search, Delicious, and Ice Rocket, conduct searches for brand mentions in news, the mass social media sphere (blogs, twitter) and on smaller niche communities. You will quickly come up a list of the communities hosting conversations about your organization, products or brand, and the members (often time bloggers) engaging in those conversations.

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

Key Sites:

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

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

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

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

Recommended Reading:
Participating in the Social Media Ecosystem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forum One hosted the Online Community Unconference East last Wednesday, February 10th in NYC at the Digital Sandbox. Most of the attendees were able to make it despite the snowy conditions.

Moving Forward, Together
Although it was cold and snowy outside, we had a warm and cheery group to kick off the morning. I ordered extra hot chocolate to further brighten the mood. We felt like this event was particularly well-timed. Boosted by recovery from the great recession, interest in online communities and social media is at an all time high. Most organizations are actively developing or refining community and social media strategies, and are trying to figure out what to build and where to engage. For many organizations, the goal is to develop a holistic social web strategy that refines based on learning from previous years of experimentation and many experiments strewn across the social web. The real question for me coming in to this Unconference: How do we move forward? This question framed the Unconference, and played out in our theme “Moving forward, together”.

I asked the participants to use the theme as a lens for their discussions. Specifically, I encouraged participants to think about this: what do you need to move forward personally, professionally, at your organization, and as an industry?

Setting the Agenda
Heidi Nobantu Saul was our facilitator for the Unconference, and she did a masterful job of explaining the concepts of Open Space and guiding the group through the agenda setting process. The essence of Open Space is that participants are free to suggest a session topic, and those who host a topic are responsible for hosting the conversation. Participants are responsible for placing themselves in sessions that they are learning from and / or contributing to the most. In short: if you are in a session that you are not contributing to or getting value from, then go find another one.

Session Topics
The final agenda had approximately 30 sessions on topics including:

Are we creating community really?
Douglas Atkin hosted a session that asked the simple question: are we REALLY creating “community” online? The group was somewhat divided over the topic, but most eventually agreed that online communities do foster a certain level of connectedness that qualifies as community.
Notes for the session can be found here.

Integrating Social into the Enterprise
Pauline Ores of IBM convened this session to explore the integration of the social web into the Enterprise. Two key theme from the session: 1. Organizational transformation is needed to get real value out of social/community initiatives and 2. The results/benefits of social/community initiatives are useless if not tied directly to clear business objectives and integrated back into the enterprise.

Online Community & SEO
David Flores of Everyday Health hosted a session to discuss taking advantage of the SEO value of online communities and social media. The group discussed the implications of tailoring social content like blog posts to be more SEO friendly, like formatting blog post titles similar to how members might construct a search query. The key takaway: Job #1 is to write good content – and it will be found.

Does Validation / Verification Help Grow/Engage Communities?
Mike Mostransky hosted a session to explore the role of verification, identity and reputation in online communities. One key question was verifying purchase / use of a product in product-based communities.

Other sessions included:

• Getting Past “No” – Social Media in Non-Social
• Structuring Incentives: What Works Best? (Points, Cash, Stuff, Status)
• Defending Value of Your Online Community: Competing with Other SM Platforms
• B2B Subscription Based $ Models / (Low Hanging) Revenge for B2B Networks
• Node XL Online Community (Twitter!)
• Members & Advertisers Product Testing / Advocacy Programs
• Dichotomy Between Control & Awareness in Social Media
• Best Practices / Tips for Creating Viral Marketing
• Legal Issues with Overzealous Critical Content from Members

Key Takeaways:

Moving Forward – while we didn’t get to the tangible outcomes I had hoped for, particularly a community metrics standard, we did make some progress. An initial conversation was had about the challenges with creating a set of generally agreed upon community metrics (GACM), and we will continue to push this forward over the spring, with plans to have a solid draft by the Online Community Unconference West on June 10th.

Social Infusion – one key theme was that social media is invading every department, not just marketing, products or support. With growing awareness and interest, there is also a genreal lack of leadership and strategy at most organizations. As I said in my opening remarks to the attendees – most organizations need to think more holistically about their social strategy, and the group of internal stakeholders required for ongoing management and governance. Which leads to…

Holistic Online Presence – most organizations are struggling with how to prioritize off-domain (think Facebook) engagement, and how to combine off-domain with on-domain activities.

Increasing Rays of Sunlight – Even with the sustained interest in social media during the recession, many folks were affected by layoffs and downsizing. It was encouraging to see old friends with new jobs, as well as the number of companies at the OCU seeking new employees (including Forum One).

Twitter Stream
The twitter stream was going strong with lots of good tidbits, ideas, and discussions from the event.
#OCUE10 Twitter Stream

Flick Stream From #OCUE10

Blog Reactions
Notes from the Online Community Unconference East 2010 – Matthew Lees / Impact Interactions
Takeaways from Online Community Unconference East 2010 – Marshall Sponder / Web Metrics Guru

A BIG thanks to our Sponsors:

#OCUE10

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

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.