The evolving role of the Community Manager

Cross posted from the OC Report:

The topic of online community team organizational structures seems to be getting increasingly hot.

The two main questions seem to be:

• Where does the community team “belong” in a corporate structure?
• What are the roles on that team?

I’ve explored the former a couple of times, so I thought I would spend some time on the roles of the team, and in particular, the community manager. I would really love to hear what you think about this. I know leaving comments on this blog can be a bit of a pain (working on it), so if you have any issues, please email me.

The role of Community Manager seems to be evolving in the following ways:

• The role is less about moderation and more about product management.
Most thriving communities need little action by the moderators. Management tools are (in general) sufficient enough to combat spam, and most communities have empowered the members with tools to flag abusive or inappropriate posts. Simply put: with adequate and findable community guidelines, active moderation can (and should) be in the hands of the members. strategy, features, UX, platform, budgets, marketing (and a hundred other things). In short, very much like the role of a product manager.

• An expectation of communicating value (ROI) rather than stats
Community managers are now expected to not just report stats (page views, membership growth), but also to report on other points of value, and to contextualize that value, at least in part, in terms of progress on business goals.

• Community managers are expected to grow relationships with the influencers in the community
Community managers are increasingly expected to know who their lead members are, and what effect their influence has on other community members.

• Community managers should be thinking about “portability” of their team
In some companies, sources of community funding, and even the reporting structure of the community team is changing every few quarters. We live in evolutionary times, so it is good for community managers to reach out to senior staff on teams outside their immediate reporting structures.

In some cases, seasoned community managers are evolving into the Community Director, with several functions reporting in to him / her. My Community dream team would look something like this (YMMV):
• Moderators
• UX
• Analytics
• Content Manager / Community Editor
• Marketing
• Developer / Ops

I’d like to hear from the community managers out there. What are you experiencing in your day to day work? What am I missing here?

Wow – Jeremiah is going to Forrester

Just saw a tweet that Jeremiah Owyang is going to Forrester. Wow, big news.

Seems like a natural progression for him. He works awfully hard at staying up to date (and updating everyone else) on the social media space.

Congratulations Jeremiah!

Online Community Roundtable @ SAP: Wrap up

A big thanks to Mario Herger and Mark Finnern from SAP for hosting the group, and for their continued support and participation.

We had a really great turn out, and lively discussion.

First, we are relaxing the “soft NDA” policy quite a bit. We are now asking participants to let other attendees know what shouldn’t be blogged about. This will allow (I hope) a lot more content to come out of the sessions.

We always start the roundtables with a cocktail hour. During this time, we encourage folks who are going to lead a discussion to sign up “on the big board”. Last night’s topics included:

• Community Net Promoter Scores
  A discussion of the artice “The One Number You Need to Grow,” by Frederick Reichheld. Should community managers use net promoter scores to asses teh health of their communities? The discussion concluded that this was a helpful indicator, but that it should be used with other quanatative and qualatative data. Interesting article that responds to Reichhel’s article here:
  http://www.greatbrook.com/customer_feedback_program.htm
• Building bridges to Academia
  Community managers might be interested in connecting with academics studying social media, social netowrks and specific measures of activity and value. This will only work if your org feel comfortable opening up your metrics to outsiders.
• How to Kick start a community, I hear it’s hard
  A discussion about how to grow a community, and how to determine logical target size. The interesting bit for me was the various measures of customer base vs. community membership. These ranged from 1% to 25%.
• The road to vibrancy
  This session was combined with the session above. On the fly. Mashup-style. Becuase that’s how we roll at the roundtable.
• Injecting “controversy” within the community –Why it’s not always bad
  I had a hard time following this discussion, but I think the net of it was that sometimes it’s an interesting marketing tactic to intentionally stir up contreversy in order to feature your service or product. The discussion also went in to the idea of tolerance around controversial content and personalities in a community (encouraged).
• Scaling Community
  This discussion revisited the previous topic around logical community size, and techniques to scale up membership, participation and content.

Other Interesting tidbits:

Time / value as a metric: This applies to “hanging out” on news pages, twitter, or in virtual worlds. A proposed metrics around time invested, vs value returned per minute. I have no idea how you would quantify value (maybe member self-reporting?), but I found this though-provoking.

Logical community size: How do you determine a logical community size for a community? Having an existing customer base is helpful, but what about startups that are soley focused on growing communities? What is the equation to determine this? I generally advise clients with existing customer bases that 1-10% of base converting registered membership is great. This is mostly based on my experience.

Aesthetics for Social Applications: I’m a recovering UX guy at heart, so when the discussion turns to design, I’m all ears. Christina Wodtke made a really great point that succesful social applications tend to have a “signs of life” feature, which is essentially a news feed of activity. Think facebook or twitter.

Corporate Rebels DO get it: I would hazard to guess that there are “pockets of resistance” in even the most stodgy corporate environments that are doing everything they can to connect the org and the customer through social experiences. I keep hearing that most companies “don’t get it”. Ok, sure. This keeps those of us consulting in the community / social media space in business. But I constantly meet people at these supposed clueless corporations who are fighting tooth and nail to get the execs to listen. These are my peeps, as I count myself as one of their lot while I was at Autodesk. The fact that we had 15 people who were mostly from these “clueless companies” spending time after hours discussing how to better serve their respective communities gives me hope that we are on the right track.

Thanks again to everyone who participated in the amazing discussions last night.

Jeremiah O blogged about this as well on the Web Strategist blog. (highly recommend / read it daily)

We created an Online Community Roundtable group on Facebook.

Next Online Community Roundtable: 8/22 @ SAP

If you are in the Bay Area, and are actively working with online communities, this event might be of interest to you.  It’s invitation-based, so please drop me an email if you are interested.

—
The Roundtables have been a regular, but intentionally “under the radar” gathering since July of 2005. Thats longer than BarCamp (ok, only by a month). The intention of the events is to provide an open and safe environment for community practitioners to share experiences and best practices. It’s also an excellent excuse to have a cocktail and meet other interesting people in the space.

Ground Rules:
* No sponsorships. Host organization provides space, food and beverages
* No pitches. Presentations should be about sharing experiences, having a discussion about a problem or issue you are facing, or reviewing a project or site you are working on.
* The guest list is up to Bill & George.
* Bill and/or George sets final agenda based on topic appropriateness and time available
* “Soft” NDA: No blogging, or discussion “in public” about specific presentations or content, unless the presenter gives explicit permission.

Format:
6:00 – 7:00 Networking hour.
Drinks and food will be available.

7:00 – 9:00 Presentations.
After the networking hour, we’ll share thoughts on community. We request that you bring a 1-2 slide deck to talk to. Topics can range from:

* A report back from a conference
* A new community that you have recently launched
* A feature that you are developing, or are interested in discussing
* Challenges that you are facing in developing, growing or managing your community
* Or any other topic that you feel would be appropriate and enlightening to this audience.

We try to keep the size of the group small (about 25 people) to ensure a quality group conversation. As such, we limit invitations.

Marketing & Online Communities: Techniques still rudimentary

Cross-posted from the Online Community Report.

I initiated the Marketing & Online Community research study in June of 2007, as a function of the Online Community Research Network. The study was conceived as an investigation into the current state of marketing to online communities, from the perspective of both the online community host, as well as from the perspective of a marketer.

We had over 60 completed surveys, and participants included large software companies, large community destination sites, niche community sites, platform providers and interactive marketing and advertising firms.

One of the most interesting findings from the study actually surfaced early in the process. We discovered that while community hosts and practitioners were willing to share their experiences, most marketers were not. After several in-person interviews, it became clear that most marketing and advertising agencies have not met with great success in their community marketing efforts, and are generally unwilling to talk about their experiences to date.The responses from the marketer’s perspective are proportionally less than those from the community host’s, but the insights provided are still of high value.

From the community host’s perspective, one of the most surprising takeaways was that community hosts were still largely relying on banner and text ads as their main marketing and advertising vehicles.

I’ve included 2 of the most relevant question summaries from the report below:

Q: What types of marketing and advertising activity do you support on your community sites?
Summary: Banner and text ads were the most common forms of marketing activity, followed by RSS, branded content and surveys. There was activity indicated on most categories of community marketing, which seems to indicate willingness on the part of online community hosts and practitioners to experiment with new forms of marketing to their communities. Virtual world storefronts and sponsored podcasts scored surprisingly low, given the media attention in the last 6-9 months.

Q: Is advertising targeting available on your site? If so, please select all options that apply.
Summary: Run of site and contextual targeting were available on the majority of respondent’s sites. More sophisticated technologies, like behavioral and demographic targeting were only available on a few of the respondents communities. Given that there is generally a large amount of demographic data available in a community members profile, it would seem that there is a large opportunity to engage in more sophisticated ad targeting on sites currently just offering run of site or contextual targeting.

The Marketing & Online Communities report is published by the Online Community Research Network, a collaborative research series for online community professionals. If you would like to learn more about the Marketing & Online Communities research report, or more about the Online Community Research Network, please visit the OC Research Network home page.

Mattel: How not to handle a PR crisis

I’m pretty sure Mattel couldn’t possibly be doing a worse job of addressing the current toy recall issue, short of trying to suppress it.

As the parent of a 2 year old, who owns several toys from the affected toy lines (but not affected toys), I feel like I have some skin in the game on this one.

Check out the “Voluntary Safety Recall Facts” web site. The whole thing smacks of PR circa 1975.

Here is a little unsolicited design advice Mattel. When you have a sensitive issue, and hundred of thousands of worried and pissed off parents, don’t use SO MUCH RED. It’s ok to go a little off-brand on this, trust me.

Second, let’s look at the letter from Bob Eckert, CEO, patronizingly titled “Because your children are our children to”. WTF?!? What does that even mean?

Dear Fellow Parents,

Many of us at Mattel are parents ourselves. And like you, we know that nothing is more important than the safety of our children. As you may know, Mattel has recently voluntarily recalled some products for two different reasons: impermissible use of lead paint and risks associated with small, high-powered magnets.

We want to ensure that every parent is aware of these issues, returns affected products to us and knows that we have already taken significant actions to further ensure the safety of our toys.

We hope that we don’t have to recall any more products, but if we do, we pledge to address the matter promptly and to inform you quickly.

Our long record of safety at Mattel is why we’re one of the most trusted names with parents. And it is our sincere hope that the actions we are taking now will maintain that trust in the future.

Thank you for your continued trust.

Bob Eckert
Chairman & Chief Executive Officer
Mattel, Inc.

I find the statement “thank you for your continued trust” a bit presumptuous. The entire reason any consumer would be on this site is because they don’t trust Matel. This is an opportunity to reearn parents trust, not presume it.

The video is probably the worst offender. Every word scrubbed by PR, shot in a sterile corporate setting. It comes off as pretty lame and insincere. What could Bob & co have done better here? How about losing the tie, for starters. How about showing footage of staff on sight in China implementing “3 point process changes”, instead of describing them. The majority of the video is spent seeming to blame their manufacturers, instead of accepting responsibility. The much needed apology comes close to the end, and seems like an insincere but required part of the “script”.

update: One thing I forgot last night… where are the opportunities to participate on this site? Why can’t I leave comments (vent)? If I were Mattel, I would much rather have this activity happening on my site, where I could visibly respond, than offsite.

Discussion Groups: The catalyst for developing your community strategy

If you are currently developing your company’s online community strategy, and are struggling with all of the options available to you, a project to benchmark your discussion group experience is a great place to start. The members of your discussion groups will likely not only contain your most ardent evangelists (and probably most vocal critics), but will also contain the DNA to a more mature community strategy.

The intention of the benchmark is to look at the following areas:

1. Member Experience: Do members feel like they are getting what they need, in a way only your organization can deliver?
2. Community Strategy and Management: Does your organization have clear goals around your discussion groups? Is the community being managed to these goals?
3. Technology: Is your technology platform supporting member needs and community goals? Is it capable of evolving?

Community Strategy and Management could arguably be broken out into 2 separate sections, but based on several conversations I’ve had of late, the role of community management, and specifically, the community manager is evolving. It’s not just about moderation anymore. The new role of the community manager is to actually manage all dimensions of the community experience (moderation, UX, funding, metrics, etc).

The benchmarking project would be made up of several smaller sub projects and data gather exercises, specifically:

1. Benchmarking User Experience
- Member Satisfaction: Conduct a web-based survey to ask members about the quality of the user experience, feedback on the quality of message exchange, the level and appropriateness of moderation, the level of participation by members of your organization, and finally, would they recommend your discussion groups to their peers? Finally, ask about additional features or community touch-points members would like to see from you, including blogs and social networking. 50 to 100 responses to this survey would be a great baseline. For more sophisticated organizations, tying this survey into any sort of customer satisfaction, loyalty or brand-tracking research you are doing will be quite insightful. At Autodesk, we found that are Discussion GRoup members were more loyal customers than non-members.
- Usability: Gather 5-6 members from your community and have them walk you through the main interactions points they use on your discussion groups. This can be done in person, or over a web conference like WebEx or ReadyTalk.
- Find-ability: Gathering this data is very straightforward. You want to answer the following questions: Is your discussion group content showing up in google? Available from you site via RSS? How many clicks from the main flows of your corporate site?

2. Benchmarking Community Strategy and Management
- Budget: What is your total cost for hosting discussion groups? This includes staff time, moderation, license fees, hosting fees, bandwidth and any marketing you do. The other side of the coin? Who’s paying? Do you have a defined sponsor for the program, or are you asking for money quarter over quarter? Identifying additional potential sponsors helps smooth out quarterly-based funding, and also gives you a bigger checkbook for updates and platform extensions.
- Moderation: Review your moderation program. Do you have lead members assisting the moderator(s)? You should. Do you have clear and available discussion guidelines? Do your moderators have to directly intervene in the groups several times a week? A high level of moderator intervention is a big red flag that something is not working.
- Metrics & Reporting: What data are you reporting back to management? A big red flag here is “none”. That means you aren’t doing a good job of communicating value (bad), or your management team doesn’t care (even worse). What types of metrics are you reporting? Unique visitors and page views are great. Membership growth and attrition is better. Showing engagement via member participation numbers is really good. It’s also possible to do a rudimentary level of “word of mouth” reporting by highlighting key threads that net out the key issues for the period of time you are reporting against.
- Internal participation: What is the current level of participation by your organization in your groups? If it is low, you are going to hear about it loud and clear in the Member Satisfaction survey mentioned above.
- Member outreach: Do you have any sort of program in place to highlight, reward or otherwise engage your most active participants? Some call this an MVP or Lead User program.

3. Assessing Technology
Caveat: I’m not a technologist, so I would recommend getting very friendly with your web team or operations staff to help you with this part of the project
- Performance: The 2 things you are looking for here are 1. Are the groups available 99% of the time? Significant downtime because of maintenance or database issues can wreak havoc on a communities health. 2. How fast do the pages load? Ideally you are getting sub 5 seconds (at least).
- Scalability: If your traffic and participation doubled tomorrow, could your current system handle it? Again, take your favorite systems geek out to lunch and get their opinion.
- Cost: The platform market has become VERY competitive. There are a number of vendors that have evolved their platforms beyond just discussions over the last few years. Now is an excellent time to review your existing contracts, and to re-shop your platform provider.

Once you make it to this point, you will have a massive amount of data. Because of the nature of this exercise, you will also have checked in with your membership base to guide any additional augmentations to your community, as well as the folks internally who can help fund and participate in the next generation of your community.

Now the fun starts.
You will have almost certainly uncovered opportunities to refine your existing discussion groups presence, and you likely tapped into unmet needs your members are expressing. You will almost certainly have uncovered ways in which your organization is coming up short by the amount or type of participation in your community. Lastly, you will have a good idea of current vendor capabilities with regard to their platforms. In short, you will likely have all the data you need to plan and sell a project to your management team that entails extending your current discussion group-based community experience.

The two most logical and easiest ways to extend your discussion group-base community presence are blogs and social networking.

Blogging: Corporate blogs have been in the mainstream for a good while now, but I’m still surprised by the lack of product and industry-based blogs with some of our clients. Blogs tie in nicely with discussion groups when staff that are currently participating in discussions start blogs to highlight trends in the groups, or to give members of the groups deeper insight into that persons role at the host organization, and also that persons personality and day to day life.

Social Networking: Another great way to extend a discussion group-based experience is to add social networking to the groups. This option is available in most of the latest versions of discussion software, and essentially involves creating a richer member profile, allowing members to expose their profile page, and allowing other members to browse, find and connect with them. Not only does adding social networking features add a dimension of personality to the groups, at can also support offline analogs, like in person user groups.

The takeaway: most companies could be doing a better job with their discussion groups, and could be providing and receiving more value from the current investment. Further, discussion groups provide a logical path towards engaging in more sophisticated online community building activities.

Social Bookmarkingin plain English

The folks at Common Craft have put together another great “in plain English” video. This time, it is on Social Bookmarking.

Enjoy!

Next Online Community Roundtable: 8/22 @ SAP

The next Online Community Roundtable is 8/22 in Palo Alto @ SAP.

The Roundtables have been a regular, but intentionally “under the radar” gathering since July of 2005. The intention of the events is to provide an open and safe environment for community practitioners to share experiences and best practices. It’s also an excellent excuse to have a cocktail and meet other interesting people in the space.

Ground Rules:
* No sponsorships. Host organization provides space, food and beverages
* No pitches. Presentations should be about sharing experiences, having a discussion about a problem or issue you are facing, or reviewing a project or site you are working on.
* The guest list is up to Bill & George.
* Bill and/or George sets final agenda based on topic appropriateness and time available
* “Soft” NDA: No blogging, or discussion “in public” about specific presentations or content, unless the presenter gives explicit permission.

Format:
6:00 – 7:00 Networking hour.
Drinks and food will be available.

7:00 – 9:00 Presentations.
After the networking hour, we’ll share thoughts on community. We request that you bring a 1-2 slide deck to talk to. Topics can range from:

* A report back from a conference
* A new community that you have recently launched
* A feature that you are developing, or are interested in discussing
* Challenges that you are facing in developing, growing or managing your community
* Or any other topic that you feel would be appropriate and enlightening to this audience.

We try to keep the size of the group small (about 25 people) to ensure a quality group conversation. As such, we limit invitations.

If you are interested, please let me know.

Online Community Research: Metrics 2007 Report Posted

The Online Community Metrics 2007 research report has been posted on the Online Community Research Network. You can download the report from the OCRN home page.

Some of the most significant findings published in this study include:

• Metrics options: a wide-ranging list of new and different metrics which respondents found valuable apart from the norm of page visits and unique visitors.

• Desired metrics: a valuable wish list that has been complied by online community professionals for online community professionals.

• Tools for collecting metrics: a highlighted graph on data collected to see what the best services, tools and techniques are for collecting and analyzing online community data.

• Demonstrating ROI: Quantifying the value of community efforts for management.

• Advice: Top tips accumulated for community managers concerning best practice metrics.

Our research is predicated on the belief that the best source for information regarding online communities continues to be other online community professionals. A quote from the report:

“Numbers tell a story, but numbers only tell part of the story. Metrics are important – page views, new threads & posts, etc all tell you hard growth facts. But part of community is organic — how the culture is developing, how many people are forming deeper relationships with each other — these are important things for community growth that can’t be measured.”

Again, the full report can be downloaded from the Online Community Research Network home page: http://www.onlinecommunityresearch.com

This research study is conducted as part of the recently launched Online Community Research Network (OCRN).

The OCRN is a collaborative research effort of online community professionals to better understand the challenges of building and managing online communities. You can find more information on the OCRN home page, if you are interested.

Enjoy the report!