Bill Johnston: Online Community Strategy

We had another successful Online Community Roundtable event in Mountain View last night. George Jaquette from Intuit was good enough to host. Representatives from several Bay Area companies attended, including Autodesk, Apple, Salesforce.com, Symantec, SAP, Dwell Magazine and the Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation.

The Online Community Roundtable is an opportunity for managers of the Online Community function at Bay Area companies to come together and informally share best practices, discuss relevant business issues and to network with peers. The format is an hour of socializing followed by 90 minutes of guided discussion around a short topic set. The price of admission is a willingness to participate in the discussion. We ask attendees to present a short case study, or lead a guided discussion around a relevant question or topic. We try to hold the Roundtable every 2 months, and we alternate locations between the South Bay and San Francisco.
The intention of this event is to bring local Community experts together to discuss their experiences, issues and best practices so that the participants as a whole come away with a greater understanding of how to engage, and create value with their respective communities.

If you are in the Bay Area, and interested in being invited to future Roundtables, please send me an email: bjohnston@forumone.com .

Billy Dee Williams was just in a flashback sequence.

Cross-posted from the OC Report:

OC Business Forum: Coming Together Nicely!

Thursday, March 29. 2007

The Online Community Business Forum is coming together nicely. We are hosting the invitation-based event May 3 - 4 in Sonoma.

Sorry, but I have to drop a few names here: we have attendees from Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, IBM, eBay, Sun, Autodesk, Cisco, TV Guide, and Consumer Reports.

The draft agenda is set, and Jim and I are working on refining it based on the attendees. The cool thing about doing a relatively small and invitation-based conference like this is that we can really tailor the content to the attendees.

The working agenda, as it stands:

Thursday May 3rd
1:00 - 1:30: Registration at Saddles
1:30 - 2:30: Session 1 / Introductions and Welcome
2:30 - 3:15: Session 2 / The State of Online Community
3:30 - 4:00: Break
4:00 - 5:00: Session 3 / Business Models
5:00 - 5:30: Wine Tasting
7:00 - 8:30: Wine, Hors Doeuvres - El Dorado Kitchen

Friday May 4th
8:30 - 9:30: Registration / Breakfast
8:30 - 9:30: Community and Good Ideas Demos (open podium)
9:30 - 10:00: Introductions
10:00 - 11:00: Session 4 / Subscriber Income
11:00 - 11:30: Break
11:30 - 12:30: Advertising & Marketing Panel
12:30 - 1:30: Lunch
1:30 - 2:30: Break Out Sessions - Community ROI, Support Communities, Developer Communities
2:30 - 3:00: Break
3:00 - 4:00: Session 6: On the Horizon: Future Online Community Business Models
4:00 - 5:00: Wine and Snack
Evening: No host dinners at Café LaHaye, Saddles, elsewhere (optional)

The other really cool think about hosting an event in Sonoma is that we have ready access to the world’s best wines

Disclaimer: I love my Tivo, like everyone else.

What’s up with Tivo?

Why is it:

So hard to connect with other Tivo users and share content?

So hard to transfer content between Tivo and my pc and macs?

So hard to download premium content, like movies, to my Tivo ( i know it’s in the works)?

That Tivo doesn’t embrace it’s community at large? They don’t even host their own boards?

I don’t get it…

Sharon and Mel joined me on my trip to Seattle this week.

I had really great meetings with folks from Microsoft, Sony Erricsson, and the LeFevers from CommonCraft.

Have I achieved a work / life balance nirvana yet? Not quite, but having Sharon and Mel on the trip was a blast, and I still got a ton of work done.

Cross-posted from the OC Report.

As a follow up to all the recent questions I’ve been getting about basic online community strategy, I’ve decided to write a series on online community basics. First up is one of my favorite topics: research!

Start With Research: The 3 questions to ask.

Q1. What does your current community ecosystem look like?
It’s important to make an inventory of your existing community touch points. Think you don’t have any? Think again.

A potential starter list:
- user groups
- independent bloggers (check blogpulse.com)
- discussion groups / google groups / yahoo groups
- enthusiast sites
- industry / topic publication sites
- meetup.com / upcoming.org

You should be seeing some signs of life. Found something? Good.

Q2: What do your customers, prospects or partners need from you?
As a business, you are in a unique position to provide value to your community of prospects, customers, and partners. This could be simply providing a “clean, well lit place”, exclusive content, or access to your employees. How do you gain insight into what your community needs? Ask. Face to face, conference calls, email questionnaires, or web-based surveys (survey monkey) are all effective and relatively cheap. You can also hire research firms that specialize in this type of needs-based analysis.

Q3: How would your organization benefit from hosting a community site?
This question is in it’s rightful place. Ask not what your online community can do for you… or at least not as your first question. Seriously though, it’s important to align your community strategy and direction with your general business strategy. Who do you start with? The stakeholders who will be writing checks to pay for the ongoing community infrastructure, moderation, and maintenance. Including stakeholders in this phase will also help to ensure buyoff, and help flag any early concerns about unrealistic or inappropriate expectations of the community. Others you may want to involve? Your web team, marketing, product management, and customer support.

Cross-posted from the Online Community Report:

The Shared Insights folks have posted links to all the blog covergage from the Community 2.0 conference here:
http://www.community2-0con.com/?p=238

I’ve had a few days to let all the threads running through my brain since the end of the conference settle. Here are the things that rise to the surface.

Mobile Communities: Thanks to Anders from Nokia, I am now convinced that the mobile web in general, and mobile communities in particular will play a large role in shaping “what’s next”. For mobile communities to take off in any meaningful way in the US, the carriers will have to agree and services and standards. Companies like Loopt are already making inroads with the major carriers. How significant a shift will this be? It seems reasonable to think that any social application (think next gen myspace or linked in) that doesn’t require the form factor of a large lcd display to interact with it will make it’s way on to a mobile.

3D / Avatar-based Communities: In general, folks at teh conference seemed to think that these destinations are interesting, but not really meaningful. Kaneva just entered the space that Second Life, and to a certain extent There, have been dominating. I think there is lot’s of opportunity for innovation with this type of experience, especially given the wild success of World of Warcraft and other MMOGs that are essentially the older brothers of these more hangout-oriented sims. Unfortunately in their current state, the experiential investment required to participate Second Life is not worth the overhead. I look forward to changing my position on this.

Marketing in Online Communities is bad / evil / wrong: There was lot’s of discussion about the intersection of online community and marketing. The Edelman / Wal Mart fiasco came up in a couple of presentations, and in conversation. There was also an interesting exchange at the breakfast sponsored by WebEx. The main points of the marketing vs. community debate seemed to be:
- A marketeer has as much of a license to market in the community as the community gives, and this license can be revoked at any time.
- A marketer should be transparent about their intentions for participating in or sponsoring a community.
- The pre-Cluetrain models of marketing no longer work nor are appropriate

Obviously this is a topic ripe for further discussion.

Some Companies Too Risk / Transparency Averse: I was a little surprised at the volume of questions about the pros and cons of engaging in community building activities. I’ll just make a few blanket statements here Yes, your company needs to be blogging. It won’t be as hard, take as much time or come with as much liability as you think it might. Further, you should think about making the electronic brochure that is your current web site a little more participatory (forums, content sharing?). For those of you who actually have online community offerings, how about not burying them 2 and 3 layers down on your web site?

ROI: Matthew Lees from the Patricia Seybold Group led a really interesting panel on the ROI (return on information) of online communities. He has a really great model, and I know he intends to post some of his slides so I won’t try to paraphrase them. I will say that one of the points of value I forgot to mention in the discussion was that of comparative value. For instance, how much does it cost to blog vs. conducting a print advertising campaign? How much does it cost to host a discussion forum on a topic related to your business vs buying a tv spot?

Attention Saturation: Every day, more and more online experiences are vying for attention. From a supply and demand perspective, Joe or Jane Websurfer’s attention seems to be getting to the point of being fully saturated, while new online social experiences are popping up every day. Something has to give, and it will likely result in destination site closures and/or consolidations.

Here are my slides from the Community 2.0 session:

“Community ROI - Return on Information”

http://www.kingmonkey.com/ocmetrics_c20_final.pdf

I’m heading off to the airport, and will be in Las Vegas tonight thru Wednesday.

If you would like to meet up, call my cell 415.299.9638, or send me an email: bjohnston@forumone.com.

Two interviews I recently conducted for the Online Community Report:

Shawn Morton from TechRepulic / Cnet
In addition to his “day job” as Product Manager for TechRepublic, Shawn is also behind Profilactic.com.

Steve Nelson from Clear Ink
Steve has a great point of view on the intersection of marketing and online community, and keen insite into Second Life.

Please check them out.