Bill Johnston: Online Community Strategy

The video from yesterday’s Business Social Software Jeopardy session is up: https://admin.acrobat.com/_a773188684/p54581379/

It was a lot of fun. Sam was an excellent Trebec, and Jeremiah Owyang and Laura Ramos of Forrester proved worthy adversaries.

Sam has an excellent write up here:
Juicy tidbits from yesterday’s Jeopardy!

Note: This is cross-posted from the OC Report.

You have probably been hearing the term “social graph” a lot in recent weeks.

Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook describes the concept in a recent Business Week article:

As he (Zuckerberg) describes it, this is a mathematical construct that maps the real-life connections between every human on the planet. Each of us is a node radiating links to the people we know. “We don’t own the social graph,” he says. “The social graph is this thing that exists in the world, and it always has and it always will. It’s really most natural for people to communicate through it, because it’s with the people around you, friends and business connections or whatever. What [Facebook] needed to do was construct as accurate of a model as possible of the way the social graph looks in the world. So once Facebook knows who you care about, you can upload a photo album and we can send it to all those people automatically.”

Since the Business Week interview, it seems (at least to me) like the concept of the “Social Graph” has taken on a life of its own. The definitions of social graph (at least from what I’ve seen) range from the mathematical construct Zuckerburg describes, to a mapping of relationships in a particular network. Others have suggested that the social graph maps relationships as well as contains activity streams, semantic data, and more.

I’m trying to get my head around this, as I think many are. I tried to think of the smartest person I know who regularly studies social network theory, and Marc Smith from Microsoft Research immediately came to mind. Marc was kind enough to answer my questions via email, and a transcript of that conversation follows.

Q. What is your definition of the “Social Graph”? Can this concept be discussed outside the context of social network theory?

I do not think you can get away from the ideas in social network theory and still make any sense of the concept “social graph”.

Computer Mediated Communication systems are social networks.

“The Social Graph” just means that since Joseph Moreno’s 1934 work on sociograms, we recognize that [1] all entities are tied to other entities through relationships and [2] all relationships can be represented as directed graphs, node lists, and matrices, and that each of these data structures is amenable to further analysis. The current fad is just the ever growing awareness of these facts combined with a very real change in the costs of authoring, collecting, and analyzing these structures in digital media. In a social network nodes are people and edges or lines that connect the nodes are relationships.

Our social network research focuses on relationships in older forms of computer-mediated social network services like email lists, newsgroups, web boards and other repositories of threaded conversation. We found interesting “roles” like “answer person” (seen below).

We documented this “answer person role: in a paper we recently published in the Journal of Social Structure: “Visualizing the Signatures of Social Roles in Online Discussion Groups” which is available from: http://www.cmu.edu/joss/content/articles/volume8/Welser/

Some of the tools we used to do this study along with others are available from our website (http://www.research.microsoft.com/community/projects).

Our research points to the way to move from “page rank” to “people rank” by generating “social accounting metadata”. These measures of author behavior capture the structure of conversations and populations of community participants; the results can provide useful relevance ranking features for improving community search. Eric Brill published on the topic of making use of Netscan metadata as a feature of relevance ranking algorithms:

W. Xi, J. Lind and E. Brill, “Learning Effective Ranking Functions for Newsgroup Search,” SIGIR’04, Sheffield, UK, July 2004.

We have published a series of papers in which we demonstrate the value of social accounting metadata to identify authors who display behaviors that are clearly associated with a particular role or function, such as the relatively few “answer people” who provide much of the support in online discussions.

Tammara Turner, Marc Smith, Danyel Fisher and Howard Ted Welser, Picturing Usenet: Mapping computer-mediated collective action, Journal of Computer mediated Communication, September 2005.
Viégas, Fernanda B., Marc Smith. “Newsgroup Crowds and AuthorLines: Visualizing the Activity of Individuals in Conversational Cyberspaces“, Proceedings of Hawaii International Conference on Software and Systems (HICSS) 2004.

‘Answer people,’ the folks who contribute much of the value in the Internet, are a small minority of all online users. Our paper reports that less than 2% of authors in Usenet newsgroups are likely to be the helpful ‘answer person’ type — authors who reply to many other people with brief replies. Information visualizations highlight the difference between these helpful folks and other types of contributors. Of course, the remarkable things is that so few can provide so much to so many.

Q: Does the concept of the social graph deserve the media attention it’s been getting of late?
Yes. Yes. A critical social structure is suddenly becoming very visible and computable in ways that are novel. I am impressed!

Q: Besides Facebook, what other sites or companies are doing interesting things with the “social graph”?
Everything that is about bringing people into contact with people creates a social graph, so all sorts of things are in this space. Email is about social graphs, it just often lacks the UI for the data structures it generates. That is changing, of course. Now there are applications that natively focus on the directed graph as their data structure. That is new as wellFor example, have you noticed that most email clients let you create contact records for each person you know but almost no email clients allow those contacts to have relationships to one another. Applications that generate one data structure do not always have mechanisms to read or analyze that data structure, or only gain those features as they mature.

Marc’s suggestions for further reading & listening:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_theory
http://www.insna.org/
Audio: Listen to Marc Smith’s portion of the OCLC Symposium

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.

As many of you know, I run a semi formal and somewhat-invitation-based networking group for online community pros with George Jaquette from Intuit.

We try to get together bi-monthly, alternating between the south bay and SF.

A little more information:

The intention of the events is to provide an open and safe
environment for community practitioners to share experiences and best
practices. As such, we have a few ground rules.

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, unless the presenter gives explicit permission.

Format:
5:30 - 6:30 Networking hour.
Drinks and food will be available.

6:30 - 8:00 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.

If you are interested in an invitation, please drop me a note.

At the recent Online Community Business Forum, Joe Cothrel and I presented on Online Community ROI.

Specifically, we proposed the notion that there was enough publicly available data and likely enough data internally that most companies could put together a model that describes the ROI of its’ Online Community Investments.

Session 3: Online Community ROI
Publicly available stats (compiled by Joe)

- Community users remain customers 50% longer than non-community users. (AT&T, 2002)
- 43% of support forums visits are in lieu of opening up a support case. (Cisco, 2004).
- Community users spend 54% more than non-community users (EBay, 2006)
- In customer support, live interaction costs 87% more per transaction on average than forums and other web self-service options. (ASP, 2002)
- Cost per interaction in customers support averages $12 via the contact center versus $0.25 via self-service options. (Forrester, 2006)
- Community users visit nine times more often than non-community users (McKInsey, 2000).
- Community users have four times as many page views as non-community users (McKInsey, 2000).
- 56% percent of online community members log in once a day or more (Annenberg, 2007)
- Customers report good experiences in forums more than twice as often as they do via calls or mail. (Jupiter, 2006)

From the Forum One OC ROI Survey (April 2007):
- Only 22% of respondents had clear ROI Model
- 42% had staff of 1-5 people
- 49% Report Monthly to Mgmt
- Establishing ROI Model was a priority for most respondents in the near term

Full powerpoint deck here.

We will be adding blog posts, flickr feeds and maybe even a tweet or two throughout the day.

I’ve heard a lot of discussion around creating formal online community strategies in the last 6 months. I’ve also heard of (and experienced) community efforts that are stalled or even abandoned because of lack of a formal, codified strategy. Personally, I think this is just silly. Think about it: What if you had to come up with a formal communication strategy, put it into powerpoint, and shop it around to all the VPs before answering the phone the next time it rings? Whether you host one or not, your organization has a community that is networking, forming opinions about you, and growing stronger every day.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to encourage everyone to pursue creating online communities with reckless abandon here. What I am saying is that there are factors in play that make it easier, more beneficial and more crucial for you to engage in community building activities for your organization, if you haven’t already.

As I mentioned in a previous post:
1. It’s cheaper to engage in community-building activities. We’ve gone from 7 figure portals to free independent communities to 5 figure deployments for customer, large-scale sites.
2. It’s faster to deploy. Days and weeks, not months or a year.
3. Community already exists. The fact is, your org or brand already has a community. If your customers aren’t talking about your products or services online, you might be in trouble

4. Passionate customers have an appetite for engagement online (and to varying degrees, the flavors of less passionate customers). Customers have an expectation that your company is available and “present” online.
5. The value is starting to be measurable (but still difficult)

The reality is, for most companies it’s close to impossible to create a buttoned up online community strategy at this point. Some reasons?
- In most companies, there is no ownership of community at the executive level
- Community responsibilities scattered over multiple organizations: support, marketing, online, product management, IT, to name a few.
- The expertise for creating this strategy typically isn’t in house. It needs to be grown, contracted, or hired.
- ROI is difficult to clearly quantify at this point.
- The community at large is not employed by the company, and does not necessarily function in the organization’s best interest. This tends to give execs, and particularly marketing and PR, fits.

What can you do?
Start with quick wins. Create a blog. Participate in other hosted discussion groups or online communities. Go to one of your user group meetings and get to know the attendees. Communities start with small networks and weak ties that grow larger and stronger over time. Even a single person in a large company can make a difference. Don’t use lack of “strategy” as an excuse to not start a basic community engagement effort To my earlier analogy mashup: pick up the phone.

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.

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.