The LugIron Software Blog

I’ve been intrigued by Jeremiah Owyang’s List of Corporate Social Media Strategists – a curated and categorized list based on a person’s LinkedIn Profiles and a previous list from 2008. He has separated it into strategists and community managers, an interesting distinction, but necessary since the jobs would be very different day-to-day. The job titles are a pretty wide range. The lists include people working at companies larger than 1,000 but in the comments he invites anyone to start a second list with smaller company entries.

In the spirit of content curation, I sought interviews with people from each of those sectors. Some are on YouTube, some are in text, all are interesting. Enjoy!

• Airline: Morgan Johnston, JetBlue (video)
• Automotive: Scott Monty and Paul Thomas, Ford (podcast)
• Business Services: Debbie Curtis-Magley, UPS (video)
• Consumer Product Goods: Bonin Bough, PepsiCo (text)
• Electronics, Devices, Mobile: Marcy Cohen, Sony (video)
• Financial Services: Ben Foster, Allstate (text Part One – Background and Blogs, Part Two Twitter and Summary)
• Health and Life Sciences: Lee Aase, Mayo Clinic (text)
• Media and Entertainment: Jessica Berlin, Cique de Soleil (video)
• Retail: Barry Judge, Best Buy (podcast)
• Technology, Hardware, Networking, Component, Computer: Richard Binhammer, Dell (text)
• Technology, Software, Internet: Peter Parkes, Skype (video)

Technorati Tags: community, Facebook, interviews, new media, social media, Twitter

Some of us LugIron folks attended this week’s Austin Social Media Breakfast. We heard about PetRelocation.com and their social media strategies from Kevin O’Brien, CEO, and Rachel Farris, director of PR and new media and employee number 2.

Their talks inspired me to think about some basic ways that you can build user engagement in communities whether it’s on Twitter, through blog entries, in a community you build yourself, or on Facebook.

Some background on their business – they do corporate relocation for people’s pets when someone moves for their job. Their community is an amalgam of groups all over the Internet. There are the raving pet fans – they are mostly on Facebook. There are the relocation professionals – they interact on a group on LinkedIn.

Tell stories – Rachel highlights a pet move of the month and posts a photo about the move also. On their Facebook fan page, they have testimonials from people who have moved with their pets.

Be social – Kevin talked about integrating social interaction into every area of the business, even transforming accounting. Each interaction from sending invoices to receiving payment has an opportunity to socialize.

Think neighborly – Another quote from Kevin that stuck with me was “We don’t want all the land, just the land next to ours.” Because their market is so focused, they don’t have to build the biggest site or community. But related sites could be their community “neighbors,” like Dogster and Catster.

Remember the little guys – One of the most “sticky” stories on their site is about Larry the Lobster, a 70-year-old lobster in a New York City restaurant tank who was mentioned on Bloomberg. Even though PetRelocation didn’t end up doing the relocation, he was freed in the ocean near Maine, and the audience delighted in the story.

Everyone loves a t-shirt – They gave out t-shirts that said Be social on the front with their Twitter handle on the back. Here in Austin, we still don’t tire of t-shirts. When I first moved here before the boom, my 20-something programmer friends wore nothing but free t-shirts and cargo shorts and we always knew what they were working on or what they represented because of their shirts. T-shirts are a often physical representation of an event, and events are a great part of building community and engaging people.

How about your ideas for uncomplicated user engagement practices?

Technorati Tags: community, engagement, social business, SocialMedia

Last week I posted a piece about measuring community efforts titled How Do You Measure Community? An additional interesting measure for your community is “how effective is your community manager?” Here an excerpt from an interview with Jono Bacon, Art of Community author and Ubuntu community manager on LinuxQuestions.org:

What do you consider the best metrics for evaluating how successful a community manager is?

Metrics are an impossibly complex topic in the space of community management, and it is difficult to answer this question without sounding a little too fluffy and unspecific. While there are many community metrics available at a more granular level, many of which we use in the Ubuntu community (bug numbers/linkages/growth, patch workflow, sponsorship queue triage, membership, growth of different initiatives etc), it is more complex to determine the combined efforts of a community manager on his or her community.

I think the most significant metric is the health and success of the community that they serve. If a community is productive, thriving and growing, the community manager is certainly doing something right. Then at a finer grained level we can gauge success by how that community manager inspires and encourages and how he or she can think outside of the box to build growth in new and interesting ways.

Naturally, I don’t believe the success of a community lands solely with one person’s job description or key performance indicators. But it’s a great idea to take a day and thank community managers who make it all happen, whether their work is behind the scenes or representing the members of the community, advocating for the members. In fact, yesterday Jeremiah Owyang called for a Community Manager Appreciation Day to occur annually every 4th Monday of January.

This day isn’t intended for head-patting or a bouquet of flowers, though I’m sure small gifts are always appreciated. Rather, it’s a day for community managers, directors of community, customer advocates, or company evangelists themselves to take time for themselves and their families and realize why they go through the challenges they do. A nice spin-off post from DJ Waldow who’s the Director of Community at Blue Sky Factory, tells people what it looks like to “play on Twitter all day” – ha.

I also like Jeremiah Owyang’s suggestions to thank people who made your experience better in the medium where you experienced the warmth of community getting things done for the you as a customer. If the service was on Twitter, people used the #CMAD hashtag to publicly thank people. I love the results of the search with the displays of gratitude.

Today I greatly admire and thanked Adam Hyde, founder of FLOSS Manuals for his recent collaboration authoring efforts, by posting to my blog at Just Write Click. So, how’s your community manager or customer advocate doing? What can you do to support them and thank them for a job well done? We’d love to hear about it.

Technorati Tags: advocate, CMAD, community, community manager, customer expererience, Customer Support, Jeremiah Owyang, measure

Community analytics and social media metrics spur heated debate in many circles. In fact, at SXSW Interactive in 2007, the Social Media Metrics panel had attendees and chatroom users revolting. I was there and hardly knew what to make of the uprising at the time, but in hindsight, I can see how important the information can be to web developers, community managers, and product owners, to name just a few.

But as Lisa Baron says on the Outspoken media blog, “it’s not rainbows and butterflies and sparkles” that build your community and help it meet its goals. It’s not rainbow sprinkles either. It’s the common, lowly buck. And when your communities goals are synced with business goals, you can tie business goals to your community measures.

Lisa has some specific measures that she grouped into four categories: Growth, Presence, Conversation, Sentiment, and Referrals & Conversions. Her insights are extremely valuable to use as communities “grow up” into real make-or-break efforts for businesses and organizations.

Also, be sure to check out Rhea Drysdale’s post on monitoring social metrics where she uses Google spreadsheet functions to count feed results and monitor ratings and so forth. Great ideas.

How do you measure your community efforts?

Technorati Tags: building community, community, community management, measure

Here at LugIron, besides working on these freshly baked updates, we’re working on a book with case studies for successful enterprise communities. It’s a focused study of communities for specific purposes, similar to my book about using the social web for documentation. Our goal is to interview community managers in the enterprise, especially those who are actively engaging in specific tasks like customer or technical support, sales, marketing, education, and so on. We want to know the favorite value measures, performance indicators, and so on, for social communities, forums, blogs, or social tools like Twitter or Facebook.

In return, we plan to distribute the book far and wide, and we will ensure that participants get a copy. Eventually, we’ll also work on a collection of interviews with the consistent contributors that make a community hum, so keep your super stars in mind to nominate later in 2010.

If you’d like to participate, please leave a comment or contact me directly (email Anne @ LugIron). You can also contact me through Twitter, @annegentle.

It’s a great project and I hope you’ll forward this request on to your favorite community managers.

Technorati Tags: community, Facebook, management, metrics, platform, ROI, Twitter, value

I just finished the book, Julie/Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen. The author calls her readers “bleaders” – apparently it stands for blog readers. When I first read “bleaders” I guessed that means they bleat like sheep, and chuckled every time I read it. Who are the people behind the “bleaders”  – and what are they doing when they leave your carefully crafted site? At LugIron, we’ve been talking about how different tools have brought a broader sense of community online, from blogs to microblogs, email to Facebook messages. For example, some people use hashtags on Twitter as a community communication tool – call it an adhoc conversation aggregation platform, perhaps. Others might feel that a mailing list is as tight-knit a community as their neighborhood association (perhaps tighter!)

Speaking of tight-knit, check out Ravelry.com, a knitting community with over half a million registered users. Sarah O’Keefe compared Ravelry to Lions Brand Yarn’s hosted community in a recent webcast, Strategies for coping with user generated content. It started me thinking, how could the yarn company understand the crossover between superusers on Ravelry and their Facebook fan page, for example? Can you create a funnel to understand the levels of engagement each of those users bring to the broader community?

Right now, it seems like the scenario above would be a manual process and tedious at best. Maybe you’d look for them on LinkedIn, Twitter, or WordPress even before performing a Google search for their first and last names.  To take this aggregation to the next level, you’d need a way to aggregate their identities from multiple social sites.

Many sites have information about people, but we’re not even close to unified online identities in a practical sense. We need to be able to aggregate knowledge from multiple social sites. Imagine if you could figure out who the key players are in an online community by having a “human network” view of a community. A social community platform that gathers information about a person by looking at their Twitter bio and posts, recent Wordpress or Blogger posts, their Facebook Wall, or their LinkedIn Profile. Once you could take a look at a person’s online representation, you could connect the dots for your internal and external community presence. Let’s talk through a few scenarios based on someone’s job title.

Community managers

The good community managers are not only leading, advocating, and getting things done daily, but they are also analyzing and reporting back to show the value the community brings to the company. They have a plan for the community, goals for the community, and know every nook and cranny of the content offered. Reports and analytics are great as well as good content. They’ll meet periodically with the next group, the product managers.

Product managers

Product managers have the vision and ideas, but they want feedback from customers constantly to see the priorities of the market place. Community collection points for suggestions, ideas, and data help them do their job and also ignite the spark for the next great idea.

Sales representatives

I think they want to know more about who they know in the community, continually. For example, they could view notifications when key customers tweet something relevant. As Jeremiah Owyang puts it in his post Placing Bets On Social Strategy, SCRM, and Mobile in 2010, “Most companies don’t know they need it, but as customers increase their social behavior, tacking, managing, and responding will become increasingly difficult.” Sales reps who already know Salesforce inside and out could use a new view of the customers in multiple communities.

Support representatives

I’ve talked about Twitter as the place to cluck or whine, but there is real opportunity for customer service through community offerings. People go to the web for answers, troubleshooting help, or to help others by paying it forward. Customer support communities leverage that power.

What do you think of these scenarios? Can you know everything your community members are up to, between blogging, ‘booking, tweeting, and listening? Can you get to know them better by aggregating the data? We think so, but would love your thoughts here as well.

Technorati Tags: community, Facebook, funnel, management, platform, Twitter

An interesting report was released this week from UC San Diego’s Global Information Industry Center. Titled “How Much Information?“, the report measures the American consumption of information in words, bytes, and hours including printed materials, radio, TV, and computer. There’s a PDF download of the entire report. The study measured consumption in 2008, and it measured the flow of information – not the static existence of it, such as what’s found in a book. The summary says that consumption measures”100,500 words and 34 gigabytes for an average person on an average day.” Let’s face it, that’s a lot of data flow. Let’s tie this consumption information into the content that flows in and out of communities.

Many online communities do not center around content at all. In fact, it’s relatively rare for a community to care for content as a goal of theirs. Usually the meritrocacy has much bigger plans and goals than just “let’s make some content flow.”

Jennifer Leggio uncovered a very interesting point about the amount of content in a community when she interviewed Mike Hardy, strategic communications program manager, about the Pitney-Bowes support community. As you can imagine, Pitney-Bowes community members were interested in getting mailings out the door, not creating a bunch of posts about postage! Here’s the revelation that I found most interesting from the ZDNet article:

There were some lessons learned along the way, however. “We came out of the gate with way too many topics out there,” Hardy said. “We quickly learned that with too many topics and not enough interaction to start, it made the community seem empty. It’s what I call ‘empty restaurant syndrome’ — if you look in a window and no one is in there, you likely won’t go in.” Hardy said that the company quickly pruned down the community and focused the activity, and also put some promotional power behind the community. After making those small changes, the community really started to grow.

These revelations from others who have been there can help you shape a plan for building your own community. As Rachel Happe puts it, “Communities gather around a concept or common goal not around a collection of content (although content does plays a major role, it is not the impetus for the community).” So while content creation tempts someone like me, a writer, it’s the way that the content helps people accomplish something that really counts.

Technorati Tags: community, content, writing

Guy Stephens, a Customer Knowledge Manager known as @guyatcarphone on Twitter, has done an excellent job of what I like to call “content curation.” He created this new Youtube collection of videos of interviews with people who know about customer service with social media. Guy maintains a blog called “being guy.” Don’t miss an interview with Guy on Digitally Engaging.

Most of the videos are less than 8 minutes, and watching these interviews is a great way to learn how companies are providing customer service with Twitter, responding to bloggers, and generally using Web 2.0 tools for customer service. One of my favorites was this interview with Frank  Eliason, the brave person behind the @comcastcares Twitter account.

The collection contains a good mix of interviews, slideshows behind interviews, and screencasts of different toolsets for this line of work.

As a builder of products, is it more important to simply win customers or should you also strive to convert those users into community contributors–active participants in a self-reinforcing virtuous cycle?

Users are people who have to do something with your product for their job or at home. They may or may not want to be good at it. They might want to figure it out and move on. Community members who truly “belong” to the community are those who care about helping others or want to prove their knowledge. They get such a kick out of their own abilities that they want to help others kick it up as well. An example of such a superstar community member is Michelle L. Long of Lee’s Summit, MO. She’s a 45-year-old accountant who has posted more than 5,600 answers on the Intuit community. I found the BusinessWeek link through Arie Goldshlager’s blog entry about Intuit’s “Narrowcasting” Approach to Customer Communities. Michelle Long is not only a user, but a user who likes to impart knowledge. When I’m doing my taxes, I definitely fall into the “user” category. I just want the number at the end of the piles of forms. But I would love to get help from a community with people who love calculating taxes so much, they’ll help others with the forms! 

I’m guessing it’s no accident then that Intuit’s community is the top search result in Google for “customer support community.” Intel and Cisco are in the top ten on that page. And the concept of a customer support community is described quite well by a Cisco Program Manager in the blog entry, Are you a 10 Percenter?

An online community is an interactive group of people joined together by a common interest. The Support Community is such a group. It exists for users and enthusiasts to share tips among themselves on how to solve problems they have encountered with their computers. It is also a forum to explore new ideas and new ways to use technology.

Tips, problem solving, ideas, and innovation – who wouldn’t want all these things for their products? There’s immeasurable value in sharing those with community members and building community rather than building a user base alone. There are reports that say value is measurable from community efforts. From Lithium’s 2007 State of the Practice Report, AT&T reported in 2002 that Community users remain customers 50% longer than non-community users. And, it appears that when users take care of each other on communities, the sales tend to follow, which generates even more users. Ebay’s 2006 survey found that community users spend 54% more than non-community users. I believe you can measure both intrinsic and extrinsic value from communities – so which do you think is more valuable, a user or member?

Technorati Tags: community, groups, networking, social networking, social web, wiki

Ideas. Inspiration. Innovation. Ignition. What is the spark that ignites a new idea? Inspiration for ideas can come from any where, any one, and serve customers, neighbors, businesses, or employees.

Some companies are finding ways to ignite ideas using web-based applications that give the “crowd” a chance to crowdsource so that their ideas are heard. Last week, Starbucks “Ideas In Action” blog described 50 ideas that came from their My Starbucks Idea community. The first one they implemented was a splash-free sticks, which looks like a good solution to the problem of cup jostling causing coffee overflow. Their ideas list includes discounted work wear, which was a partner idea, so the ideas are coming from both customers viewing from the outside in, to employees viewing from the inside out. Perpectives represented all around! With the holidays just around the corner, and gift cards on the way, you’ll be glad to know that the ability to transfer card balances was the fourth implemented idea on the list!

I love reading through these new ideas, often the ideas themselves make you think of another idea. With an easy-to-use, low-barrier-to-entry tool, you can collect all those ideas and have your community not only give you the ideas, but help you implement them too.

Technorati Tags: gift cards, ideas, innovation, inspiration, spark, Starbucks