What to expect at the Online Community Unconference East

The Online Community Unconference East will be held February 10th in New York City. To learn more about the event, or to register, go here: http://ocue2010.eventbrite.com/ .

So, how does this Unconference thing work? The premise of our Unconference series is that the best source of information on online communities and social media is the community of practitioners actually doing the hands on work. The Unconference format provides a venue for participants to lead discussions about topics they are most passionate and knowledgeable about. At the end of the day, attendees walk away with new ideas, perspectives, and a long list of new professional connections. One of the most amazing parts of the day at our Unconferences is the topic selection process. Our Unconference uses the organizing principals of Open Space Technology to create the event agenda. Said another way, the topics discussed during the day are suggested and lead by Unconference attendees. At the start of the morning, any attendee who wishes can come forward, announce a topic, and claim one of the 50+ open slots on the grid.

Attendees announce session topics

The agenda begins to form

Within about 35-40 minutes the grid fills up with topics

Once all the topics are announced, we begin the Unconference sessions. The agenda grid plays the role of gathering place and ideamarketplace throughout the day, as attendees come back to the agenda to check for any updates, changes, or new sessions.

Outputs If you would like to see an example of the great content that comes out of an Unconference, please check out a few of these resrouces:

• The Online Community Unconference 2009 wiki
• The The Online Community Unconference East 2009 wiki
• The Online Community Unconference 2009 Book of Procedings (.pdf)

I would encourage you to spend some time looking through the session notes and the book of proceedings, as there is a lot of great content.

Again, to learn more about the event, or to register, go here: http://ocue2010.eventbrite.com/

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Announcing Community Manager Appreciation Day #CMAD

Last Friday, Jeremiah Owyang had a simple question: Is there a national day recognizing the work of Community Managers? The question spawned a conversation, which spawned a proposal for the day of recognition:

That day is today. Happy Community Manager Appreciation Day!

Every fourth Monday in January will be Community Manager Appreciation Day.

Community Managers have a challenging and exciting role. One the one hand, they are called on to be the personification of their organization to the online communities that they manage. One the other hand, they are also charged with being the advocate for the community back to the organization. Sort of like a benevolent double agent The role of the community manager is evolving quickly as well, and we are starting to see the “swiss army knife” aspects of the role mature in to distinct roles on the community team: community product manager, moderator, internal community manager, social media manager, social ux designer, and many more disciplines.

We should take time to celebrate the folks doing the hands on work of shaping, supporting and nurturing online communities.

Background about Community Manager Appreciation Day from Jeremiah’s blog:

Now, Recognize A Community Manager, Every 4th Monday of January

While we agree with common manners to always thank someone after they’ve helped you, just take a moment to pause.. and think. Why would someone willingly go through the above mentioned challenges? Because of their passion to improve the company, and help customers have a better relationship.  In many cases, a genuine ‘thank you’ can mean more than a yearly customer satisfaction survey. Take the time to recognize and thank the community manager that may have helped you while you during your time of need.

If you’re a customer, and your problem was solved by a community manager be sure to thank them in the medium that helped you in.  Use the hashtag #CMAD.

If you’re a colleague with community manager, take the time to understand their passion to improve the customer –and company experience. Copy their boss.

If you’re a community manager, stop and breathe for a second, and know that you’re appreciated.  Hug your family.

This isn’t just about a single role, but a bigger trend of making product and services more efficient, and thereby our world a little bit more efficient and sustainable.

I happily endorsed this proposal along with the following community leaders Jeremiah pulled together over the weekend:

Connie Benson, Rachel Happe, Jake McKee, Sean O’Driscoll, Lane Becker, Dawn Foster, Thor Muller, Amy Muller and Jeremiah Owyang.

Back to Basics: Want to Know What Your Community Members Need? Just Ask.

This post is part of an ongoing series about developing an online community strategy. As a reminder, all posts will be tagged #ocb2b In my last post, “The Strategy Team & Goal Definition” I discussed the importance of identifying internal stakeholders for a community, getting the stakeholders engaged, and the process of defining initial goals for the online community strategy. In this post, I will discuss the crucial role of member research in creating a successful community strategy. In the most basic form, a community strategy is a balance of an organization’s goals and member (a.k.a customer) needs. Note: I will be using the terms “member” and “customer” interchangeably in this post. I will also use the term “member” as a placeholder for current and potential members of a community.

Why Conduct Member Research? Conducting member needs research as part of the strategy development process brings the voice of customer to the center of the strategy, and helps create a lens through which to focus your community building activities. Specifically, member research can help answer questions like:

• What are member’s expectations of you / your organization as a community host?
• What role should you play as host, and what community activities should you facilitate?
• What types of content and features should be present in the community?
• Should the community be an “on domain” destination, or should the community presence extend on to other sites, like Facebook?
• What types of members does the community want to include?
• What type of culture does the community need to thrive?
• What activities are members prepared to participate in that will directly or indirectly benefit the host?
• What types of marketing and advertising would members find acceptable?

Techniques for Conducting Member Research: The process for conducting member research is straightforward: decide on the appropriate techniques given your budget, recruit subjects, conduct the research and analyze the results. Great places to recruit research subjects:

• Your existing community
• Your blog
• Your corporate web site
• Partners
• Newsletter mailing lists
• Customer Conferences
• Independent communities about your product or in your market or topic area
• Facebook or Linkedin groups about your product or in your market or topic area

One on One Interviews
One on one interviews can be conducted either in-person or over the phone. The key ingredients are a customer, an interviewer, a notetaker and a simple interview script (a sample can be found below). Interviews can be as short as 30 minutes, and generally should last no more than an hour (in our experience). In my experience, a minimum of 5-6 interviews will yield useful themes and give good data for strategy direction. If your community will serve many different products, market segments or customer types, a good rule of thumb is to try and do interviews with at least 3 people from each segment, if possible. One on One interviews can also be augmented nicely by a follow up online survey to a larger group, in order to drill down further on issues uncovered in the initial round of interviews.

Group Sessions Another great way to get feedback, and to get a lot of feedback at once is to conduct a group feedback session. This is similar to the one on one interviews, except you are guiding a group of members through the script, as opposed to just one. Involving multiple subjects at once increases the complexity of the process, so be sure to have someone skilled at facilitation leading the session to keep the conversation on track (per the script), as well as to ensure that all participants have equal air time to give their opinions and feedback.

Online Surveys The fastest, and often lowest overhead way to get member feedback is to create a short online survey to send to research participants. Online surveys are really great at getting quick quantitative feedback, and the results (depending on the tool) are fairly easily to analyze and study. A few issues with online surveys are that the quality of the results depends on the quality of the questions, and in particular, thinking through appropriate choices for multiple choice questions, and also creating effect write in questions that will yield helpful qualitative feedback.

In most cases for the community and social media strategy work I do at Forum One, I will generally conduct a set of 7-10 One on One interviews with community members, and follow up with an online survey to at least 100 community members.

Questions to Ask During Research There are essentially 3 overarching questions you want to answer as an output of member reearch:

1. What do community members need from you as the host? Ask questions that explore member expectations of your organization in the role of host. What are the member expectations around your level of participation, your effort in developing content, in fostering participation and your commitment to hosting the community long-term?

2. What do community members need from each other? Explore what community members might desire from interactions with other community members. This could range from knowledge sharing, to providing mentoring, to ongoing professional or personal support.

3. What can community members contribute? It is important to understand what ways community members are capable of, prepared and willing to participate. Participation could include sharing domain expertise, offering content samples, answering suport questions, or even just participating in casual online conversation. In order to answer the key questions, you will need to ask a series of baseline demographics questions (for context), as well as exploring each of the three key questions in a more granular way. A sampling of questions that can be used to create a script or facilitation guide are included below. Sample List of Interview / Survey Questions:

• Name, organization, title, a brief role description
• What information sources do you rely on (relating to the topic of the community)?
• What groups (on/offline) are you a member of (relating to the topic of the community)?
• What products / services do you use (relating to the topic of the community)?
• What is the biggest challenge you face in your day to day work (assuming this relates to the topic of the community)?
• How satisfied are you with the level and type of communication you have with organization x?
• Do you currently participate in any of the following social media activities: blogging, discussion forums, facebook, twitter, youtube etc (shape the list based on your audience)
• What information, insight or content do you want to share with other customers?
• What kinds of information would be helpful for other customers to share with you?
• If organization x were to offer the following content or features, please rate how useful each would be to you: discussion forums, expert Q&A, tutorials & tips, video previews, customer blogs, etc.
• Would you be interested in connecting with other members at local, in-person events?

A Note About Being “Member Shy” I continue to be surprised at the lack of member research in many community strategy projects. Even for organizations that are highlighted as examples of “getting it”, there are still cases where the community wasn’t engaged in research about a major platform change, feature enhancement or policy shift (facebook privacy anyone?). In many cases there seems to be a real fear (or at least discomfort) in connecting 1 to 1 with customers. Fear could be rooted in the ability to have meaningful interaction at scale, the overhead associated with regular contact, or the lack of an evolved organizational culture that encourages this type of interaction. Any community strategy development (or refinement) initiative *requires* the input and direction of the members. I’ve seen investment in member research pay off consistently, just as I’ve seen the severe cost of not conducting member research hamper or sink many community projects. In short: Want to know what your members want from their online community? Just ask.

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*Rough* Notes from the Online Community Roundtable: 1/11 at Salon.com / The WELL

<img src=”http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4062/4275223112_c8cdaf25d1.jpg” align=”left” alt=”" /> We started the 2010 series of Online Community Roundtables last Monday, January 11th in San Francisco at the offices of Salon.com / The WELL. Salon hosted ~ 30 of us (THANK YOU!), and we had 3 hours of fantastic conversation about our collective experiences in 2009, and most importantly, where we are going as an industry in 2010, and how community professionals can help support each other.

Organizations present included: Autodesk, Apple, Salon.com / The WELL, Overtone, Answers.com, Cisco, Peachpit Press, Zendesk, the SF Symphony, blurb.com and TechSoup. We had several independents in the room as well, including Randy Farmer and Cliff Figallo.

What follows are rough notes from the Roundtable, compiled by Gam Dias of Overtone (@gammydodger) and Randy Farmer (@frandallfarmer), one of the godfathers of online community, and co-author of @BuildingRep. Caveat: thesse are rough, mostly unedited notes. I’ve attempted to highlight some of the gems (and there are many) in bold. 

We started by brainstorming a list of key areas for potential advancement in 2010. 

What problems do we need to solve collectively?
How do we fully engage executives?

Community Team Hiring Practices

• What does the community team look like? What are the roles?
• Job Description templates?
• Screening Practices?

Platforms

• Identity
• Reputation
• How should platforms evolve?

Strategy

• How do we get them in place?
• How do we get leverage to make the strategy happen?
• How do we monitize?
• What are the metrics?
• These are hard to measure, how do we deal with that?
• Context is king

 

Lot of lists of what to measure – lots of web analytics available, but as a group can we talk about how these metrics are tied to strategy – what is the measurement process, communities have their own needs, revenue is only one aspect

For example, engagement has different meanings for different communities – so this is what I measure, and this is how I derive what I measure –

What are the strategic contexts for measurement – how do you pick the appropriate contexts

Contexts – Two extremes that have emerged, marketing centric (trying to reach your customers) and community centric (user generated content), if you only have those contexts, the systems are very different and therefore the metrics – the definition of community is per context

How to set that definition for your context (Randy – in the last two years, have advised clients not to have their own social networks, rather to piggyback e.g. using facebook connect)

Suggesting creating patterns for community definition and strategy – 3 types of community (from Cliff Figalo) – singular / audience / bazaar – can start describing our community as a pattern – this may be a good place to start.

Always been fascinated by value – passion and commitment – of individuals who will make a community happen – how can we identify and quantify these – one thing that is different about The Well is that people get to know each other on whole different contexts

Having had to screen candidates, lots of qualified and experienced people from both marketing and community perspectives – sometimes they want a brand blogger, othertimes they want a true community manager – if we start to differentiate roles, then these may help polarize things

How many people have participated in writing job descriptions and been satisfied / unsatisfied with the final job desc used by HR

 

What is “Online Community”, “Social Media” and “Conversation”

Still lots of reguritation of cluetrain regarding ‘conversation’.

How can we pitch Community to the sponsoring organization as something that creates value – so a definition that we are happy to share with our boss.

A conversation is that people are prepared to listen, that evolves, that is considered

We may have some issues with scale here – could a good conversation be had with small numbers of people?

Why are these conversations good to be had within a community versus 1:1

Audience is the difference here – even though 2 people are driving the conversation, the audience is what differentiates a community from a 1:1 discussion

Lurkers are an undervalued aspect of communities

There is a tension that we can leverage – things that can attract attention create more value that pulls back in the lurkers (who are also part of the community) – this is different to the broadcast messages from a company

Lurkers contribute attention and this may be just as valuable to the community – they may consume the advertising thereby generating revenue or they may contribute later on

Spectrum of one way to bi-direction to multiple dimensional conversations (extropy – emergent order)

So what is community?

Community formed by interaction over time – Over time being the key statement that turns interaction into context

Since the explosion of social media – community can be anything – people can feel a sense of community or feel part of one – particularly if their views are being represented by the conversation

Part of the design of a community includes giving back to the community as a whole – people who want to give their knowledge and expertise back to the community for whatever reason

What makes a yahoo group different to a message board – the difference (in this context) was membership.

Twitter is a membership structure – but the content in there is public

All communities will have a unique key structure –

Is the confusion about the word community because we see meatspace communities and purely online

The word Community is in vogue a buzz word that is completely confusing

What is the difference between community and social media – social media is the technology of twitter and is not automatically a community

For the opensalon community – it is social media because you can subscribe and follow blogs, but there is also participation. I can swing by a blog read and leave comments which makes me a participant, but if there is recurrence and reciprocation makes this community

Who owns the conversation inside a community  - who owns the blog?

Lit blogger and Book bloggers – book bloggers all acted as a community versus lit bloggers are broadcast editorial blogging

So what’s a blog? Sequential posts versus a conversation

Who is having an impact on a community – Francois G and @jowang commented that the colonists within a community are also important, @gravity7 commented that nomads are also important

Multiple hubs can stretch a community over time and

Vendors who interact with the community are valuable (cisco) – adding the shameless self-promotion district

#OCTRIBE tag – homework to explore this what is community, socialmedia, conversation – anyone want to lead this initiative? Randy volunteered

Conversations, Attention, Community, Social Media

“Community is formed by interaction over time.” – Gail quoting Cliff.

“People can feel a sense of community even if they don’t actively contribute…” – Cliff

Does RL Community definition mess stuff up?

Scott More separates Social Media (technology) from Community (behavior) – trust among the members.

Membership, not necessarily reciprocity.

 

What is the job description of a community manager?

Loyalty Marking, The Face, Community Relationship Facilitator, Den Mother, Editor, Advocate to the Organization

Metrics and Sentiment

Scott – Don’t be the ONLY representation of the community.

Janitor not Rockstar – Nina Simon
http://museumtwo.blogspot.com/2009/10/avoiding-community-manager-superstar.html

“I am here to deal with your problems, you’re here to make the party”

Communities require engineering/product design

Conversation facilitator

Fostering loyalty – increase awareness

Editorial role on content

Advocacy to show return on community investment

Being the public face of the organization

To listen and reflect the organization back to the community

Represent the community to the organization (via color coded sentiment and topic)

Don’t be the only representative and the sole person or lone voice – (the community should not die when the manager leaves)

Analyst – metrics but teaching people how to derive their own metrics

Product design advocacy – communities require engineering support

Are you human – how much of your own personality do you / are you allowed to inject into the community

In large communities, the members know when they are being shilled

Apologizer – knowing how to apologize well is a very valuable skill

Rodeo Clown – to divert the anger that other members have against each other

This is not a single role – these aspects could be shared into another

A theme this year for many organization is the maturity of the community team inside the organization, and the natural evolution of the community manager role into specializations within the community team. 

Here are a couple:

Curator – what is the answer to this question, how good is this answer, Welcoming (greeter), Policing – vandal control (from wikianswers)

Host – Community Manager – Manager (from apple) – thinking about the difference between on-domain and off-domain communities. This org lives in Support, so difficult to determine Apple’s role in social media esp from Customer Care – particularly because of the strength and

Social properties – tracking conversations, then connecting the community with the organization – community managed by Marketing (VM)

 

Real Time Feedback Loops
Rich Reader led a discussion about real time feedback loops (more here: http://richreader.blogspot.com/2009/12/real-time-feedback-loops-raise-value-of.html)

How real time feedback loops contribute to panel discussions – like eating a meal you don’t remember

(Happened at online community meetup as well as Danah Boyd at #w2e)
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2009/11/24/spectacle_at_we.html

How do you use real time feedback to increase innovation?

Lots of followers listening into online conversations

What’s the conclusion of a feedback loop – panel has consolidated and synthesized the feedback, written it up and re-circulated it, then re-solicited the team to get further comments

Can increase the audience to widen the inputs – discussion for first week of Feb for Social Media week

New book called the Backchannel – about integrating Social Media into presentations

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