What Is Your True Community?
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.
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