When the Business of a Community is Business

Email Article |  digg it |  reddit |  delicious |  StumbleUpon |  Facebook |  Twitter |  LinkedIn 

Angelika V. asks, "How can you leverage online communities if your customers are businesses?  Do businesses regularly frequent (see value in) online communities and if so, what are the success criteria to making a successful online community for businesses?"

Of course, businesses don't frequent online communities, business people do.  Similar to my last post, on creating communities for commodities, where the community will only be successful if it is about use of your product not the product itself, a business community will only be successful if it meets needs and concerns of your customers that extend beyond the product itself.  Why business people will frequent a community varies widely, and ranges from looking for business, seeking out new business partners, strengthening existing partnerships to general networking.

Looking for business/Seeking new business partners - The earliest online business community I personally participated in was PRSIG, CompuServe's PR & Marketing Forum, which I joined in the early 1990s.  I think many of the participants there were self-employed freelancers looking for business; this was certainly a good professional use of time for some, and in fact I hired several people from that forum for PR and general writing projects.  (I even made some online friends that are still friends in the real world, 15 years later.)

Strengthening business partnerships - Two common types of business communities strengthen relationships:  the Advisory Council, where customers give their supplier feedback on product development and service offerings, and the Support Portal, where customers get detailed technical support or customer service from the vendor and one another.  The Intel Open Port community, celebrating its first birthday today, is a support portal, enabling IT professionals to get better technical content from Intel than they could before.  From seeking best practices and information about Intel vPro processor technology to looking for tips managing their server environments to seeking ideas for better IT management in general, Open Port caters to the real-world, day-in-the-life work concerns of a very technical crowd.  As a byproduct, Open Port also provides a great opportunity for networking (the people kind, not the computer kind).

Networking - More recent communities that I've participated in for business have been primarily to network, providing a chance to interact with like-minded professionals. For users of a product or suite of products from a vendor, such networking provides an opportunity to share practical problems and solutions, to learn from others facing similar business challenges.

You know you have created a successful business community if your customers don't feel guilty spending time there during work hours!

"Communitizing" the Commodity Product

Email Article |  digg it |  reddit |  delicious |  StumbleUpon |  Facebook |  Twitter |  LinkedIn 

Minor L asks "How do you recommend developing a community for a B2B commodity product?"

A community centered on a commodity, whether B2B or B2C, in the end can't focus on the commodity, but on what can be done with the commodity.

This approach isn't so different from solution selling.  George Kanuck, our vice president of enterprise sales, likes to give an example where, at a prior employer, he shopped for a box supplier.  All but one of the box manufacturers who presented to his company focused on the box: its durability, its dimensions and - most of all - its cost.  Only one manufacturer actually worked to understand the entirety of the challenges that prompted George's employer to find a new supplier; as a result, this manufacturer proposed a solution that addressed concerns with packaging, shipping and logistics.  Of course, that manufacturer wasn't the low-cost suppler, but they won the business through a superior understanding of how their boxes would be used.

In a similar fashion, your community is not fundamentally about the commodity, but its applications, problems and opportunities.  A Dutch manufacturer of scissors was losing market share to cheaper, lower-quality suppliers selling through Wal-Mart and other discounters.  Now, if you wanted to develop a social-media site about scissors, you probably wouldn't entice too many members to join:  you'd run out of topics after writing about how to compare pairs of scissors during the purchase process and how to sharpen scissors.  Fiskars took a different approach.  They created a community site focused on scrapbooking, where "Fisk-A-Teers" discussed their scrapbooking projects, and of course, how they used Fiskars products.  The result?  A thriving, successful community, that helps Fiskars differentiate its products in a commodity industry.

Dealing with Detractors in Online Communities

Email Article |  digg it |  reddit |  delicious |  StumbleUpon |  Facebook |  Twitter |  LinkedIn 

Stephen B. asked during our recent webcast on community best practices, "Re. Thick Skin -- do you ever have to remove a vociferous detractor from your community?"

Vovici staff have developed the following matrix for dealing with different types of detractors in online communities and how to deal with them, including whether or not to remove them from the community.

Also see Thursday's post for my personal take on handling irate customers in communities.

Ongoing Costs of Online Communities

Email Article |  digg it |  reddit |  delicious |  StumbleUpon |  Facebook |  Twitter |  LinkedIn 

In a followup to our recent webcast, Query MR asks, "What are the ongoing costs associated with the different versions of online communities?"

According to Inside Research, the average outsourced community panel cost $159,000 in 2007.  You can "insource" the community for far less, by subscribing to a managed software provider such as a Vovici and by dedicating a part-time or full-time staff member to moderating the community, writing initial articles and participating in discussion threads.

It's also best to budget for marketing the community to your customers and prospects, though - done properly - this cost can be restricted to producing the creative, with the actual advertising costs being minimal, by piggybacking on other marketing outreach programs.

When looking to budget these costs, we've seen clients use focus-group line items and general marketing budgets.  When justifying the costs, our clients have pointed to the amount of surveys and polls they field, which far exceeds the quantity of information they could have gathered using traditional methods.

An Unexhaustive Look at Panelist Exhaustion

Email Article |  digg it |  reddit |  delicious |  StumbleUpon |  Facebook |  Twitter |  LinkedIn 

QueryMR asks, "How do you prevent panelist exhaustion?  Many firms are using some form of this online community, and people are getting tired of responding to ongoing questions/inquiries."

Here are some ways to limit panelist exhaustion:

• Do polls of the entire community infrequently.  The ABC Inner Circle only polls members twice a month, precisely to limit exhaustion.
• Develop a large enough community that you can target surveys to a random sample, excluding members who have been invited to a survey in the past 30 days.
• Avoid stupid questionnaires.  Stupidity comes in a number of ways.

• First, don't ask respondents questions your systems should know the answer to.  The example I gave in the webcast was of an airline that sent a survey the day after a flight asking the frequent flier to specify in detail the flight number, origin of the flight, destination of the flight, whether or not it was nonstop, the type of aircraft, etc.  The market-research firm that designed the questionnaire was right that such information would be useful to analyze.  The firm was wrong to assume the respondent was the best source of it; instead, the firm should have done a data merge with the airline's records.  Asking mundane questions, especially those that the firm should know, dramatically reduces response rates.
• Second, don't ask questions that are tedious or uninteresting to answer.  This is tougher to screen for, since someone in your organization thought they were interesting enough questions to include in the questionnaire in the first place.  I recently made a consumer-electronics purchase and the follow-up survey contained a double-sided matrix asking me to evaluate the manufacturer and its competitor on many esoteric attributes which frankly held no interest for me.  The icing on the cake was that every item was required.  I did not finish the survey.
• Third, don't ask too many questions.  Especially in a community, make a promise to panelists to limit questionnaire length.  Prune questionnaires ruthlessly, removing any questions that won't help make the decision at hand.  In cases where you really have a lot of legitimate questions, break the questionnaire into two separate surveys and randomly divide the sample into two. That said, panelist exhaustion is subjective.  I've seen community surveys that were long, complex and tedious, but quadrupled the response rate I expected because the subject matter was compelling to the community.  And on the other hand I've seen surveys that were short and to the point but that had a high abandonment rate on the first page, because the subject matter was not compelling. You need to watch how your community members react to survey invitations and measure response rates over time to start to determine an appropriate frequency and content strategy for your particular community.

That's all I can tell you for now.  Perhaps some day I will write the exhaustive treatment of the prevention of panelist exhaustion.

Gramma C's Process for Handling Irate Community Members

Email Article |  digg it |  reddit |  delicious |  StumbleUpon |  Facebook |  Twitter |  LinkedIn 

Tony G. asks, "What is the best process in handling an irate customer posting about your company?"

I'm assuming this is not your grandmother's online community, but that this is a posting to a community your organization manages.  Some rules of the road:

Rule #1 - Online communities are about understanding true customer experiences.  True experiences that are negative are a fact of life for every major brand.

Rule #2 - Online communities are about feedback.  Negative results are legitimate feedback.

Rule #3 - Online communities need to provide a safe environment where community members are comfortable expressing their viewpoints.   Hate speech, threats, obscenity, cyberbullying have no place in such a community.  Profanity is not appropriate to most communities.  Any member who engages in inappropriate behavior should be warned, should have all future posts moderated or should be expelled from the community, depending on the nature of the offense.

If a customer is legitimately angry and expresses that anger in strong but acceptable terms, your best bet is to connect with that customer by telephone to express your organization's regret and to take whatever steps you can to rectify the situation.  If you don't have their phone number, then email them.  On the community post, reiterate your message to them.

When initially discussing the issue, I wouldn't try to explain how or why the situation arose.  First, chances are, at this early stage, you don't have all the facts correct regarding the situation, and what facts you may have may make too many excuses on behalf of your organization.  Second, there will be a time for explanations after you have resolved their issue.

If a customer is legitimately angry and expresses that anger inappropriately, try to edit out the offensive parts of their community post while preserving the original complaint.  Don't make an issue out of this offence yet.  Reach out to them to correct the situation.  Return their anger with quiet professionalism.  Often this will get them to calm down and carry on a normal conversation from then on.

Once the situation is resolved, your organization should do an analysis of the problems that occurred and what steps you are going to take to resolve these issues going forward.  As your final message on this subject, post the results of that analysis and what steps, if any, your organization will take.  A prime reason members provide feedback is to see the organization adapt and grow based on that feedback.  When the community gives you lemons, make Limoncello.

Expelling a community member should always be the step of last resort.  Try switching their comments to "moderated" instead and post edited versions of their comments.  Member expulsion usually results in much negative discussion, even if the majority of members agree the expulsion was warranted.

Sadly, some people behave in ways online that they would never do in person.  Remove them from your community and move on.

True story:  Because I emailed a newsletter to someone who had provided me his address when he downloaded a free trial of our software, he emailed me to threaten bodily harm to my grandmother if I ever sent him another newsletter. That seemed a disproportionate response to the perceived offense. I'm sure if we were talking in person he would have expressed his displeasure to me in some more socially acceptable way.  I removed his name from our mailing list posthaste, and took solace in the fact that my grandmother - who survived the Depression, who bore seven children, who butchered and gutted farm animals to feed her family, and whom I once saw kill a snake with a yardstick - would have taught this fellow some manners.

See also:

• Dealing with Detractors in Online Communities

Best Practices for Using Online Communities for Feedback:
Bridge the Gap Between Qualitative & Quantitative Research

Email Article |  digg it |  reddit |  delicious |  StumbleUpon |  Facebook |  Twitter |  LinkedIn 

Today, Brian Koma, Vice President of Client Services, and I recorded the following AMA webinar:

Best Practices for Using Online Communities for Feedback: Bridge the Gap Between Qualitative & Quantitative Research
Event Date: August 20, 2008
Time: 10AM PT, 12PM CT, 1PM ET
Presented by the American Marketing Association

Brian and I have presented together a few times, but this was our first extensive collaboration.  It was a good chance for each of us to bounce ideas off the other and refine them.  I'm very happy with the result (except for forgetting to turn off the Mute button once when it was my turn to talk!).   

You can watch the webinar from this site.  I'll be answering attendees' questions in future blog posts in the coming week.

The Revised Apostle Model

Email Article |  digg it |  reddit |  delicious |  StumbleUpon |  Facebook |  Twitter |  LinkedIn 

The original Apostle Model does not have a dimension corresponding to willingness to recommend (promoter/detractor). In 2003, Sasser revised the model to include word-of-mouth behavior. Here is the revised model as published in Value Profit Chain: Treat Employees Like Customers and Customers Like Employees.

Defectors/Terrorists are now called Antagonists, and this segment spreads negative word of mouth about the product, based on their low level of satisfaction. Viral Loyalists are introduced as more loyal, more satisfied Loyalists who spread positive word of mouth. And Apostles/Owners are even more loyal, more satisfied and more vocal. Rather than display this typology as a grid, Sasser now shows the customer segments along a path. Sasser proposes that Satisfaction leads to Loyalty, which leads to Commitment, which leads to Apostle-like Behavior, which leads to Ownership.

Implicit in this revised model is that loyalty and satisfaction correlate to high likelihood of recommendation; no data is given to back this assumption.

In The Value Profit Chain, Sasser and his co-authors argue, "So-called satisfaction surveys must go beyond merely the question of satisfaction if they are to yield the data necessary for profiling the customer base." Questions they propose for use in surveys include:

• How satisfied are you (with the product or service)?
• How likely are you to repurchase?
• How likely are you to tell someone else about your experience?
• How many times have you purchased (all products or services of this type) in the past 6 months (or some other period of time reflecting purchase frequency for product or service category)?
• How many times have you purchased (this product or service) from (our company) in the past 6 months?
• How many others have you told about your experience (with this product or service) in the past 6 months?
• How many of those that you have told in the past 6 months have, to your knowledge, also purchased (the product or service)?
• How many times have you offered constructive criticism or suggestions for product or service improvements over the past 6 months?

This completes our coverage of the Apostle Model and popular treatments of it.

Update: This post is part of the series The Apostle Model and Related Loyalty Segmentations.

The Prisoner-Apostle Model

Email Article |  digg it |  reddit |  delicious |  StumbleUpon |  Facebook |  Twitter |  LinkedIn 

The Prisoner-Apostle Model is a qualitative expansion of the Apostle Model, developed for the service industry.  It was introduced in the paper "From prisoners to apostles: a typology of repeat buyers and loyal customers in service businesses", by Carolyn Folkman Curasi and Karen Norman Kennedy, a paper which has been cited over 200 times.

The five customer types of this model are:

• Prisoner - "trapped repeaters" - Consumers who purchase from an organization because they have few other choices.  As a result, satisfaction and loyalty measures are irrelevant.
• Detached Loyalists - "would be switchers" - Consumers with few other options who resist changing primarily because of perceived switching costs.
• Purchased Loyalists - "consumers' loyalty bought" - Consumers who do not switch for structural reasons, such as rewards programs or other incentives for repeat business.
• Satisfied Loyalists - "reasonably satisfied customers" - Consumers who are satisfied and do not have a reason to switch; a competitor can lure them away by offering better service or a better price.
• Apostles - "involved participants" - Consumers who have made an emotional commitment to a brand or who have taken action on behalf of the brand.

This model cannot easily be reduced to a graph, as one axis would not be customer satisfaction but "the importance of customer satisfaction".  It is valuable when segmenting customers through qualitative research, rather than through quantitative research.

Tomorrow, we'll take a look at Sasser's revision to the Apostle Model.

Update: This post is part of the series The Apostle Model and Related Loyalty Segmentations.

The Folk Apostle Model

Email Article |  digg it |  reddit |  delicious |  StumbleUpon |  Facebook |  Twitter |  LinkedIn 

The classic Apostle Model was not actually graphed but was simply described in a table.  Later users of the model did graph it, but they often oversimplified it as a quadrant analysis.  The following illustration is typical of the type of analysis I've seen from many different companies:

This analysis is wrong, as Jones and Sasser group "low" and "medium" together, so that "high" for satisfaction and loyalty should represent only one third of the grid (see yesterday's post).  Why did the authors specify this?  Because ratings of a 3 to 5 on a five-point scale do not indicate high satisfaction or loyalty; only a rating of 5 itself does.  For instance, Jones and Sasser report that for Xerox completely satisfied customers (rating of 5) were six times more likely to repurchase over the next 18 months than somewhat satisfied customers (ratings of 3-4).  This distinction between high scores and medium scores has also been demonstrated by Reichheld with the Net Promoter Score, where only ratings of 9-10 on a 0-10 scale indicate a high result (roughly comparable to the 5 on a 5-point scale).

Another common mistake is to use four-point scales.   One of our competitors recommends that loyalty be measured with a repurchase-likelihood scale of "Definitely Will Not, Probably Will Not, Probably Will, Definitely Will".  As Brad Bortner argues in his recent Forrester white paper, a scale with too few points "lacks enough granularity".  I'll recommend some best practices for scales for the Apostle model later in the week.

I would imagine that this common mistaken use of the Apostle Model started for three reasons:

1. The original authors didn't include their own illustration, which would have served as a template for later users of the model.
2. Many consultants are familiar with different types of quadrant analysis and simply adapted that common practice to the Apostle Model.
3. Many firms found that they had more Apostles when they inadvertently "cheated" at the customer satisfaction graph than when they did it correctly.

Tomorrow, I'll turn to the Prisoner/Apostle Model, an adaption of the Apostle Model for service businesses.

Update: This post is part of the series The Apostle Model and Related Loyalty Segmentations.

The Apostle Model

Email Article |  digg it |  reddit |  delicious |  StumbleUpon |  Facebook |  Twitter |  LinkedIn 

The notion that customer satisfaction directly affects customer loyalty is an old one.  As late as 1994, the American Customer Satisfaction Index models customer loyalty as being directly determined by customer satisfaction and complaint behavior (how organizations react to complaints).

The idea that customer satisfaction and customer loyalty could in fact be orthogonal to one another was revolutionary when first described in the article "Why Satisfied Customers Defect" by Thomas O. Jones and W. Earl Sasser, Jr. in Harvard Business Review, November-December 1995.  This work was reprised in the Jones article of the same name in the Journal of Management in Engineering in 1996, a work that - reflecting its impact - has been cited in over 800 scholarly articles.

By contrasting customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, Jones and Sasser pioneered what has come to be known as the "Apostle Model", named after one of its customer types.  can be graphically represented as follows:

The customer typology is defined as:

• Loyalist/Apostle - high loyalty, high satisfaction - "staying and supportive"
• Mercenary - low to medium loyalty, high satisfaction - "coming and going; low commitment"
• Defector/Terrorist - low to medium loyalty, low to medium satisfaction - "leaving or having left and unhappy"
• Hostage - high loyalty, low to medium satisfaction - "unable to switch; trapped"

You may be able to think of examples of products or product categories for which you fit each of these categories.  For myself:

• Loyalist/Apostle - I've subscribed to Inc. magazine since working for an Inc. 500 company in 1988; subscriptions to many other magazines have come and gone since then.
• Mercenary - I'm typically satisfied with the car I drive, but I'm not loyal.  Each of my last four cars has been a different brand.
• Defector/Terrorist - I'm typically unsatisfied with my current PDA/smart phone, and therefore not loyal, and I've switched brands each of my last three purchases.
• Hostage - I'm not satisfied with my home Internet access, but since the alternative providers are even worse, I've stayed with the same vendor for years.

Tomorrow I'll take a look at how the Apostle Model has been corrupted, misunderstood and oversimplified.

Update: This post is part of the series The Apostle Model and Related Loyalty Segmentations.

Forrester on Why Customer Sat Studies Fail

Email Article |  digg it |  reddit |  delicious |  StumbleUpon |  Facebook |  Twitter |  LinkedIn 

The backlash against measuring customer satisfaction by itself continues. Brad Bortner, of Forrester, has just written a study called Best Practices: Why Customer Satisfaction Studies Fail.  Abstract:

Spending on customer satisfaction studies continues to outpace overall market research spend in the US, and yet there is a generalized dissatisfaction with the value that companies get from such studies. They continue because there is an intrinsic belief that they should be good for business. This belief is not misplaced, but many studies suffer from intrinsic flaws, ranging from measuring the wrong thing from a customer perspective to looking for a simple metric that does not provide management guidance as to what to fix if scores are low. The keys to a successful satisfaction study include measuring what is important to customers, segmenting customers by their intrinsic value to your business, and including some key driver questions that we detail. Done correctly, a satisfaction study will not only tell you how satisfied your customers are, but how such satisfaction ties to your bottom line, and how much effort you should put into trying to raise your satisfaction scores.

How to Cheat at Customer-Satisfaction Measurement

Email Article |  digg it |  reddit |  delicious |  StumbleUpon |  Facebook |  Twitter |  LinkedIn 

I had the chance to catch up with Esteban Kolsky yesterday.  Esteban is an industry visionary (more on that in a future post), and I was fortunate enough to be a client of his when he was a Gartner analyst.  He's now a vice president at eVergance (more on them in a future post!) and a passionate blogger.  I've added him to our blogroll.

One of his recent articles really caught my eye: 

How to score a 90% or more in customer satisfaction

To my surprise, Esteban is so strongly against customer-satisfaction measurement that he gives four tips on how to cheat at customer satisfaction:

1. Know who to survey.
2. Select the words for your questions carefully.
3. Change the scale for your metrics.
4. Coerce higher scores.

Check out his blog post for the details, where he provides a how-to for manipulating such scores.  He did leave out method #5...

Last weekend I was shopping with my wife for a new couch at a local furniture store.  (When she says its name, I think "hero of the Republic of New Connecticut", not "furniture".)  After we had completed our purchase, the saleswoman said, "Now when you get the survey, make sure to answer a 10."  She did not say why we should answer a 10, but had an apologetic smile when she said this.  So, there you have it, the fifth method to cheat at customer-satisfaction scores is "5. Compensate staff based on customer satisfaction scores."

I've seen the corrosion that staff incentives have on customer-satisfaction measures at automotive dealers, office equipment stores and -- now -- furniture stores.  My wife loves their furniture, but I'm not sure what I will write when that survey arrives.  I do know what I'll be sitting on, though.

Incentives Rarely Needed for Proprietary Feedback Communities

Email Article |  digg it |  reddit |  delicious |  StumbleUpon |  Facebook |  Twitter |  LinkedIn 

Justin Cooper, co-founder of Passenger, weighs in on offering incentives:

When you approach "community" or customer collaboration with incentives (cash, coupons, free product), you are doing your brand a disservice, because you are falsely motivating and therefore diluting the underlying value of the relationship with your customers....

By engaging them, a brand will gain further insight into exactly who these customers are, what motivates them, why they make the decisions that they do, who they might influence and why and how they do it. Companies that are true to the collaborative approach will consistently demonstrate relevancy to each customer as an individual and ultimately endure the test of time.

Forging a collaborative relationship with your most valued customers is critical to the efficacy of your brand. As Kozinets notes, it's not about diluting the underlying value of your relationship through offering incentives. If you simply take the time to ask your customers what they want, they will tell you. If it sounds simple, it's because it is.

We rarely advocate setting up explicit incentive management systems specifically for feedback communities.  Many community members are happy to participate in exchange for learning what their peers are thinking.  For B2B communities, customers know that providing feedback will strengthen the offerings of the company they do business with; therefore, they don't need added incentives.  For B2C communities, if our client already has a points system in place for consumers, we can integrate with it to provide points for completed surveys and other forms of community participation.  If your B2C community isn't having success, a dedicated feedback incentive system isn't likely to be the magic pixie dust that will bring it to life.

London Calling: Beating the Credit Crunch with Segmented Customer Insight

Email Article |  digg it |  reddit |  delicious |  StumbleUpon |  Facebook |  Twitter |  LinkedIn 

I was in London on business a few weeks ago, visiting our UK operations.  By coincidence, while there, I wrote an article for the British online magazine WNIM: What's New In Marketing on the "virtuous circle" of qualitative/quantitative feedback that is enabled by coupling an online community with Enterprise Feedback Management.  In their latest issue, WNIM has just published it as the lead story:  "Beating the credit crunch with segmented customer insight". 

And I'm sure the London tourism board would like me to remind you that its their turn to host the Summer Olympics come 2012, so beat the hotel crunch and book early!

Start with a Feedback Blog, but Start!

Email Article |  digg it |  reddit |  delicious |  StumbleUpon |  Facebook |  Twitter |  LinkedIn 

For DMNews, I wrote an article, "CRM in a Web 2.0 world".  I was asked to boil down to 500 words a 1-2-3 primer for organizations to move towards gathering "Web 2.0" feedback.  I decided to simplify that message even further, into an illustration:

The important thing is to start gathering feedback and a simple start gets you moving in the right direction.  This particular picture may not be worth 1,000 words, and of course, if it's not clear enough, you can always go read the article! 

Online Communities in China

Email Article |  digg it |  reddit |  delicious |  StumbleUpon |  Facebook |  Twitter |  LinkedIn 

In recognition of the 2008 Olympics starting in Beijing today, I will address some questions about online communities in China.

Paul writes, "I enjoyed your presentation...a solid recap of the ins and outs of communities. I'd be interested to hear about any of your overseas experiences in this arena, particularly in Asia and specifically in China."

We're following with interest Senator Durbin's efforts to come up with a code of conduct for Internet software companies to use when operating in countries where Internet freedom is restricted. According to our staff in Asia, the big concern for community builders in China is the importance of moderation tools, given the lack of the right of free speech and the aversion to subjects that would upset the Communist Party authorities.

Paul followed up by email to ask, "Would that include Hong Kong too now that it has reverted to Chinese rule or do your local contacts feel that things are a bit more flexible on the island as compared to the mainland?"

According to local staff, "Things are certainly still more open in Hong Kong compared to mainland China, but the mainland government still clamps down strongly on dissent, even in Hong Kong. Though they are more flexible, the Hong Kong government needs to seek permission from Beijing. So it is certainly more subdued compared to the time during British rule."

Answering all these questions is turning into a marathon, if not an Olympic event!

Hitting the Target Size of a Feedback Community

Email Article |  digg it |  reddit |  delicious |  StumbleUpon |  Facebook |  Twitter |  LinkedIn 

Michael asks, "If you have an upper limit on the size of your FC [feedback community], do you simply do a first-come first-served?"

No, because then you have to turn away people, which can annoy them; presumably these are customers or resellers or some constituency whose feedback you value and therefore you don't want to antagonize them.

Instead, I'd recommend that you do a pilot email-invitation campaign and see what your conversion rate is after two weeks (e.g., new community memberships divided by mailings).  Then use that to determine approximately how many more emails you need to send to hit the target size of your feedback community.

That way you won't have to turn anyone away.

P.S. When creating your pilot, and all subsequent mailings, make sure to select a random sample of constituents to invite.  You don't want to bias formation of your community by selecting only your most recent customers, for instance.  A random sample will ensure that your feedback community is representative of the constituency you are seeking to understand.

Opting Out Of Feedback Communities

Email Article |  digg it |  reddit |  delicious |  StumbleUpon |  Facebook |  Twitter |  LinkedIn 

Seth asks, "Do you give an option to 'opt out' of the online community? Can they drop out without communication to the administrators?"

For our Vovici Community Builder, members can certainly opt out of receiving emails (newsletters and survey invitations and reminders) simply by clicking an unsubscribe link at the bottom of those messages. They are still members of the community, and can go to the community website and log in whenever they wish, to see messages and surveys they were invited to since they last logged in.

As a result, the community administrator can still invite such unsubscribed members to take a survey, but they are not going to receive an email invitation; the new survey will show up in their list of surveys, which they will only see if they decide to log in again.

Any member can passively opt out, of course, simply by ceasing to visit the community site.

Measures of Community Success

Email Article |  digg it |  reddit |  delicious |  StumbleUpon |  Facebook |  Twitter |  LinkedIn 

Sunday I jokingly said that today's post would be about finding love in online communities. Actually, a number of questions to the webcast were of measuring the love, or positive effects, of the community.

CP asks, "How do you disaggregate customer retention and repeat business driven by the feedback community versus that driven by other marketing initiatives?"

You can't completely disaggregate them; many factors affect retention. What you can do is look for a statistical correlation between retention and an index of community participation. One suggestion for such an index is to average the number of logins and the number of posts made by a customer.

Michael asks, "How would a company know their word of mouth increased?"

The best way is to put a WOM tracking system in place. This can be as simple as a field on a sign-up form asking "Where did you hear about us?" and including "Referred by friend or colleague" as a choice. It can be as sophisticated as using blog-monitoring software (such as Andiamo Systems) to measure the amount of times specific keywords related to your brand are mentioned in blogs and forums.

Taking Online Communities into the Real World

Email Article |  digg it |  reddit |  delicious |  StumbleUpon |  Facebook |  Twitter |  LinkedIn 

Continuing my series of answering questions from attendees to our community webcast, let's turn to Donna, who asks, "Should you bring the group together face-to-face once in awhile?"

Face-to-face meetings can certainly be a wonderful way to strengthen your ties to community members.  I know of one advisory council that is going to host an event for their community for this very reason.  If this is for a community of your largest resellers, for instance, and if they don't view themselves as competitors (maybe because they have different geographies) then an offline meeting would probably be a great idea.  A customer community meeting would make sense in similar conditions.

I also know of another community that has found even greater member loyalty by hosting an annual event.  It gives the community something to write about and discuss on the site, plus it strengthens the relationships between community members.

If you have the resources to implement this, it would be great, but 9 out of 10 of our feedback communities don't do this today.

Donna also asks, "What about online formats being so impersonal?  Do people ever get sick of it? The web seems so noisy to me, always so many windows open on my computer, etc. It's hard to focus or really connect."

This is certainly another argument in favor of having a face-to-face meeting!

Yes, people do get sick of Internet communications technologies.  Right now, there's a small backlash against email (people are declaring email bankruptcy), for instance.  I've also seen a backlash against reading on the Web vs. reading a book or magazine.  I've seen mailing lists decline and a key social networking site I use become much less frequented.

But at the end of the day I think we will all spend far more time in front of our computers than we ever would have imagined ten years ago.  Online communities connect people who have something in common but are far from one another.  MeetUp has a great motto:  "Use the Internet to get off the Internet!"  But, like many, I have hobbies and offline interests that are esoteric enough that there aren't that many offline opportunities near me.  And chances are the same will hold for many of the communities your company participates in or builds:  online is the best way to meet.

So, supplement an online community with face-to-face meetings, but recognize that these communities will always primarily be about online, virtual connections.

Next up: how can brands find love in online communities?

Agony Uncle Answers Your Community Questions

Email Article |  digg it |  reddit |  delicious |  StumbleUpon |  Facebook |  Twitter |  LinkedIn 

I'm just back from England, where I read about some actress becoming an "Agony Aunt", offering advice to the lovelorn. For the next few days, I'll be an agony uncle, answering questions posed by attendees to my recent webcast.

Lindsey asks two good questions. The first: "Are there any demographic segments of the population (like the elderly) that are less likely to participate in online communities than others?" 

The participation rate for online communities increases from age 13 to age 20, then the rate decreases as age increases. Right now, 20somethings have the highest participation rate of any demographic.

Participation also increases as income increases, until a sudden drop at high incomes ($100K+ household income). So the poor are less likely to participate. 

In terms of cultural differences (differences correlating to race rather than income), Hispanic women are underrepresented in online communities.

Lindsey also asks, "Can you provide examples of successful techniques online communities have used to keep customers coming back and interested?" 

Yogi Berra said, "Nobody goes there no more, it's too crowded!" Conversely, the more crowded an online community (e.g., the more participation), the more likely visitors are to stay and participate. So getting the community to critical mass, where enough people are contributing on their own is key.

In the early days, it's important to get first-timers to visit the community. The community should be promoted in general marketing materials (e.g., the company newsletter). Employees should link to the community from emails to customers. The community should have its own monthly newsletter summarizing what's happening and driving traffic to the community site. The thank-you pages of community surveys should lead to the community message boards. And so on. 

Tomorrow, Getting Personal in Peoria asks about face-to-face meetings to supplement communities and whether online communities are too impersonal.

Weapons of Mass Collaboration

Email Article |  digg it |  reddit |  delicious |  StumbleUpon |  Facebook |  Twitter |  LinkedIn 

This is your last chance to view my recent webcast from the AMA site without being an AMA member: "Weapons of Mass Collaboration: Leveraging Feedback Communities for Competitive Advantage".

Here's what some attendees had to say:

• "Great webcast today - thanks!  I've always been an advocate of blogging and leveraging the voice of the client to improve products and services, and ultimately the client experience to improve loyalty.  You did a great job presenting today and the content was very relevant to every organization."
• "Good presentation. What I appreciated most is that it was informative rather than salesy."
• "The webinar was fantastic - great content, flow, very well executed.  Great stuff!"

And to prove that it is a Web 2.0 world:

You read every slide word by word, and you had nothing to offer other than what was already on the slide. I could have downloaded these slides later and would have got the same amount of information - what was the value you added to the whole show? I realize that this is very critical and it probably stings - but I had to tell you because this is honest feedback from one in your online community of listeners - the very topic you just talked about.

Well said!  (And a nice tie in to feedback communities.)  I do like to offer rich slides with lots of information on them, because I give out the slides, and they have a life apart from me; people will see them who never hear my presentation.  Also, if I have really good information, I feel I should cover it with a slide.  In the rehearsal, I did retell a few community case studies, anecdotes I forgot to discuss in the actual webcast, because I didn't have clues on the slides.

I appreciate the feedback, and I'll make some changes for my next webcast:

Best Practices for Using Online Communities for Feedback: Bridge the Gap Between Qualitative & Quantitative Research
Event Date: August 20, 2008
Time: 10AM PT, 12PM CT, 1PM ET
Presented by the American Marketing Association

You can sign up at this page.  And if you watch both webcasts, I hope you'll see the power of continuous incremental innovation from feedback in action.