Web Social Architecture

Where to Start? 20 Questions for Corporate Social Media

Our social media engagements typically start with some kind of assessment, with varying degrees of formality and scope. We have an internal list of questions we use to plan these assessments, some of which are more relevant and important for a given engagement than others. Here they are:

 

1. Have you formalized the goals, KPIs, and reporting for your social media activities?

This gives us a sense of the degree to which social media efforts are aligned with the business, as well as the current state of listening, analysis, and reporting.

2. Do you know who’s talking about you online, what they’re saying, and the scope of their influence?

Most (though not all) companies I’ve worked with have a general sense of what’s being said about them online. Typically, the past year, this sense is mainly anecdotal. In the next year I expect to see much more systematic, sophisticated, and analytical listening. But if you’re not there yet, you’re not alone.

3. How effectively are you able to respond?

Yes, this begs the question of whether a business is responding at all. For those who are, the question of degree of effectiveness can be a stumper. The real question here is: How do you know how effective you are (see #1)?

4. What technology tools are you using to monitor social media activity around your brand / product / service?

People really are surprisingly resourceful when it comes to using free tools to listen online. Even for businesses without a sophisticated listening platform in place, a conversation about the tools they’re using tells us a lot about what they care about and are (or aren’t yet) able to measure.

5. Which groups and individuals are informally involved in social media activities?

Once you start walking around asking people, the variety here can be surprising. Typically corporate social media efforts emerge out of PR, Marketing, or Customer Service. But ad hoc efforts are very common, and there’s usually something important driving them. Building out a strong program requires accommodating, supporting, and enabling ad hoc efforts.

6. Whose job description includes it, and who has overall responsibility?

As you might guess, the answer here last year was very often “nobody.” Next year we’ll see a shift toward the guerilla social media people formalizing their roles and management recognizing the need for coordination and leadership. And yes, this question can set off turf wars. Tread lightly.

7. Have you defined a corporate policy for engaging with customers through social media?

If not, better get on it. Talking early to legal / brand / compliance, especially in regulated industries, always saves frustration later.

8. In what third-party venues do you have a presence?

This always yields surprises. “None…. Well, oh yeah, I guess we do have the Facebook thingie. And someone in marketing has been posting our ads to YouTube.” Or: “Marketing is in charge of our Twitter accounts. Except for the ones they use in customer service. And Dale down in R&D is a total Twitter fanatic.”

9. How well are those efforts coordinated?

Yes, more question-begging. Most often, efforts across social networks, blogs, and media sharing sites are not coordinated. Maybe, just maybe, they should be.

10. What is your brand’s online personality?

This one is a great conversation starter. It’s really about understanding how to show up in social media (hint: not with offers, and not with campaign messages). This topic is really about starting to think about how the people representing the brand should show up in social settings—authentically, as people, but as people not only representing but also enacting the brand and its character. I like to use the example of our client NAU. They make sustainably-developed clothing, and they blog not about their clothing products but about sustainability, outdoor recreation, and social action—the passions that are at the emotional core of their brand. A while back they posted, for example, a video of people moving an entire Portland, OR household by bicycle. Awesome. You want to subscribe, to follow, to befriend them.

11. How consistently do your social media efforts embody the character of the brand?

This is really a question about governance. How organized are you? Do you have a system in place to manage customer interaction across touch points? Is the system in use?

12. Where do your customers spend time online? What content do they create?

Market research typically tells us a lot about where customers spend time online. What it typically doesn’t tell us is very much about what they’re doing—So 40% of your customers check Facebook daily. That’s good to know, but to really drive action, you need to understand whether they’re there socially, professionally, or both. Whether they’re using it to market their services, keep in touch with Granny (oh yes, Granny is definitely on there), or what. They’re on Twitter, good—but what are they talking about? Whom are they following?

13. What are their preferred information sources, and how do they consume them?

What’s the information ecosystem your customers tap? Who are the influencers? What do they read? Blogs, newspapers, Digg? Are they looking at web pages, RSS feeds? Are they reading on mobile? Are they sharing things they find? Which things? With whom?

14. Where are their relationships?

Whom do your customers interact with online? Through what channels—IM, email, blog post commentary, Flickr photostreams? On social networks? Twitter? Do they use different channels for different kinds of relationships? Which ones, and what kinds?

15. What are you doing to enable customer participation on your own properties?

Do you have an email contact form buried in your footer? Or a p2p support forum? Corporate blogs? Can customers comment? Review? Rate? Can they interact with each other? Create content and add it? Suggest or vet ideas? Do they have a stake in your next version? What value can they create for each other, and how can you enable it?

16. How does your organization interact with customers online?

Can your customers contact you? How? Simply being reachable is a great first step. The next step is to proactively engage customers who need support, to reach out to your customers for feedback and ideas, and to create opportunities for customer collective intelligence to create business intelligence.

17. How do you capture business intelligence from those conversations?

Social media listening has a major difference from behavioral web analytics: It’s a two-way conversation, and it’s not just about what people do. It’s also about what they say, and how they feel.

18. What is the process for making your business intelligence actionable?

Intelligence is useless without action. But the challenges in actionablizing (ha!) business intelligence are often really substantial. How do you get the right bits and pieces to the people who can take action? This question is really about escalation, delegation, roles and responsibilities, and workflow. To make the most of what you know, you need definition around how you’re going to do something about it, who’s responsible, and how success gets measured and reported.

19. Have you monetized the value of your social media efforts?

I’ll be honest. The answer here is always no. Social media ROI is one thing, and monetized estimates of the impact of social media activities are another. ROI is great, and showing ROI in social media is absolutely possible to do. The problem is that a large portion of the payoff in social media happens over the long term and is measured in, for example, lifetime customer value and word of mouth—neither of which show up on your quarterly balance sheets.

20. Estimated the financial impact on lifetime customer value or word of mouth?

We do have a very advanced approach to this, but it’s a subject for another post. Essentially the idea is to be really smart about some monetized estimates of the value of certain measurable activities, then validate and refine those estimates over time.

 

Naturally, we don’t typically get these questions answered by sitting down with the marketing people for an hour and just asking. We basically never ask these questions in these words. A huge part of the assessment is getting time in conversation with the right people in the first place, and talking with them about their jobs, their goals, satisfactions, and frustrations. We use a combination of interviewing approaches including contextual inquiry and appreciative inquiry, and a fair amount of intuition and sneaking around. In other words, it’s not a mechanical process.

But I hope you (you few who’ve read all the way to the bottom of this post) find this list useful, and I’d really love to hear your thoughts about it. Anything missing? Anything off the mark?

Straw Horse: An Enterprise Social Media Platform Feature List

We did an internal exercise recently that produced a list of the advanced features we think are crucial for a successful enterprise social media platform. The idea is that functionality for user participation across every owned venue should draw upon a central system, enabling a multifaceted approach to CRM, data analysis, reporting—and ultimately leveraging distributed corporate efforts to generate enterprise business intelligence.

I’ll share the results of that exercise here, with the caveat that this is undoubtedly a partial list only. Your comments and suggestions are welcome, of course!

I helped think through this some of this stuff, but the bulk of the credit (including for the writing) goes to my ZAAZ colleague Ariel van Spronsen. We also had input from another longtime friend and colleague of mine, Gary Carlson, an expert on enterprise metadata management. Enjoy:

 

Reputation (authority systems)

When properly implemented, reputation systems are excellent for creating trust and motivating users to participate at greater and greater levels of engagement. When implemented poorly, High volume of participation or seniority are rewarded—the key to getting reputation right is to focus on the quality of the contribution, not the amount of it.

In implementations where credibility matters, reputation is critical. See this great presentation from Bryce Glass of Yahoo for more detail.

User management

The platform provides the opportunity for centralized management of user data and permissions, including authentication, account management, personalization, segmentation, and behavioral targeting.

User data can provide the connective link among multiple social networking implementations (personal, business group). Content owned by a user can be shared among these via permissions or syndication.

Identity services

A unified data repository means an individual user can centrally manage her public-facing identity, and also create a more robust data picture for the business .

Interfaces from the platform access custom degrees of information contained in the central identity.

Quality algorithms

User-generated ratings have important utility, but translating them directly to measure “quality” is fallible. Ratings are opinion-driven and the ability to control input is minimal. However, combined with analytics data using weighted algorithms quality becomes a more stable and useful metric that both users and business can trust.

Recommendation engine

An important use for user-generated data and analytics is the ability to enrich experiences with recommendations, prompting discovery and deeper engagement. A centralized social networking platform is primed to leverage this functionality.

Taxonomy-driven folksonomy

Tags are a powerful way to augment search and increase information “find-ability”. They also give the business a powerful view into how people are thinking about the tagged content.

A purely user-generated tag set (a “folksonomy “) has issues such as misspellings, tense shifts, and count (singular vs.. plural). A taxonomy-driven folksonomy maps user tags to a controlled vocabulary authority to allow for specific schema analysis.

Video, audio, and photo streams

A significant part of the communication among social networks will be in multimedia forms. Easy uploading, tagging, and sharing features will create a robust social media environment, greater user satisfaction, and increased engagement.

Mobile

The demand for social media in the mobile space is undeniable. Application development for a new breed of smartphones is rapidly increasing as the ability to manage social networking functions becomes a key differentiator for users. The platform should provide for mobile implementation as well as web and API calls, and it should support both content consumption and content production via mobile.

Custom syndication

Custom syndication allows users to filter and process feeds in ways that are meaningful to their specific information needs. Yahoo! Pipes is an example of a custom syndication mechanism.

Custom syndication can augment other elements of a social networking system, especially for a user group that is highly specialized in goal and purpose.

Social bookmarking

Social bookmarking functions promote the development of shared information collections among networked groups.

Collaborative filtration

Collaborative filtration gives users the ability to vote submissions (bookmarks, feeds, entries, etc.) up or down. A popular feed-based example of this is Digg. In the marketing realm, Dell’s IdeaStorm lets users identify the best ideas for product development.

Private groups

Ad hoc, user-created groups for sharing or collaboration can support communities of practice and leverage user data management features.

Microblogging

Twitter is perhaps the most ubiquitous example of microblogging, which invites low-threshold, stream-of-thought information sharing and ambient connection among networked groups. Link sharing, whether to photos or other assets, is pervasive in microblogging, creating connections that can be used in many ways.

Marketplace

A social networking platform could provide functionality for connecting people to products or services, offered by the company or by one another. Examples are Craigslist, eBay, and Xbox Live Marketplace. Marketplace connections give a strong view into communities’ product needs, and they also support, to varying degrees, the purchase process itself.

Chat

Instant communication among community members creates a synchronous communication layer that can be particularly useful within a collaborative environment for communities of practice.

Moderation Tools

Property owners need tools to support management of their users and communities, along with the structures to support governance and workflow at distributed and global levels.

 

I’m sure there are other ideas out there. and for that matter lots of ways to slice and dice what constitutes a “feature.” For example, is blogging a feature, or is discussion? Or are those both higher-order uses supported by features like WYSIWYG publishing, commenting, etc?

I don’t really want to get into an argument about that stuff, but I am very interested in what kind of emerging capabilities corporations need to support in order to realize the full promise of engaging with their constituencies online.

Do share!

Death of Email: Not a Minute Too Soon

Email is dead!

OK, maybe not yet, but the latest news certainly suggests the end is inevitable: Social networking has now passed email in global use. Here are the highlights (from Nielsen via Mashable):

New stats from Nielsen Online show that by the end of 2008, social networking had overtaken email in terms of worldwide reach. According to the study, 66.8% of Internet users across the globe accessed “member communities” last year, compared to 65.1% for email.

Some other key findings from the report:

- Globally, Facebook reaches 29.9% of global Internet users, versus 22.4% for MySpace.

- MySpace remains the most profitable social network, generating an estimated $1 billion in revenue versus $300 million for Facebook in 2008.

- Facebook is the top social network in all countries except Germany, Brazil, and Japan (Nielsen still has MySpace as tops in US in the report, but as of January ’09, that had changed).

- On Twitter, CNN, The New York Times, and BBC have the greatest reach among mainstream media companies as of late February.

Details are here: http://mashable.com/2009/03/09/social-networking-more-popular-than-email/

It’s worth mentioning that “member communities” is a pretty broad definition of social networking. It encompasses more, obviously, than formal Facebook-style social networks—it essentially includes every kind of online space where people can interact with each other!

What this points to for me is less that social networks are better than email and more that email is an obsolete tool. Simply put, there isn’t a single thing you can do with email that you can’t do better with a different tool. (And feel free to challenge that point if you like!)

The reason email, like the occasional tape deck, is still around is that it’s been a dominant norm for business communications for long enough that people depend on it. It's a standard.

But rest assured, in the same way email for personal social use is fading, it will also fade in business. It’s just a matter of time, and obviously it won’t happen overnight. And no, email won't disappear off the face of the earth. It'll go the way of snail-mail instead: Relegation to use by Luddites, a few innovative specialized uses (a la Netflix with snail-mail), and saturation with junk.

The transition to a new set of web-based communication and collaboration tools is already well underway, and it’s happening partly invisibly: The new web-based tools, for now, integrate really well with email. You can post to a Typepad blog through email, edit a SocialText wiki through email, update a Basecamp discussion thread through email, and so on. Email users the world over are, at this very moment, authoring blogs and editing wikis, some without knowing it!

The first step in supplanting a standard is to build in compatibility with it, and that's what the newer tools are doing. Email lovers beware! Your demise is at hand!

Ok ok, clearly I have a personal vendetta against email. My point is, so should everyone.

What do you think?

A Conceptual Map of the Social Web

Here's a take on the idea of the social web and how it differs from page-based and broadcast conceptions of web space. The fundamental difference here is that where broadcast thinking envisions a web of HTML pages connected by hyperlinks, social thinking envisions a web of people, relationships, and content created by people.

The individual is at the center of the social web experience.

There are a lot of ways, obviously, you might draw this picture, and a lot of things you might include on it. For example, you could group the social web into communities, contacts, and content. But I've done it this way partly to offer a typology of social web sites.

Here's a take on six important types:

 

Social networks are about individuals.

Social networks are sites primarily structured to support pages about individuals. Those pages become collectors of relationships. For example, on my Facebook profile, you can see links to the people I know, and I can interact with those people through a variety of tools.

Communities are about groups.

Communities are different than social networks in that they are built primarily around groups of people, rather than individuals. Another way of saying it is that the group is the point in communities, whereas the individual is the point in social networks.

Blogs are about a singular perspective or subject.

Blogs are structured around individual posts that typically have in common either that are are written by a single person or that they are focused around a single subject. The content is the point, and individual pages on blogs reflect that focus--they are structured around individual blogs posts and meaningful collections of blog posts (e.g. category pages, time-based archive pages, and, on group blogs, author pages).

Social media services store, edit, and share content.

"Social media" is a term that gets used to mean all media through which people interact--as a stand-in for the equally vague "Web 2.0," for the blogosphere, or for online communities. Here I mean it in the more specific sense of socially-enabled web sites used primarily to share personal content, such as photos, videos, or slideshows. Flickr, Vimeo, and SlideShare are good examples. Of course, you could argue that these sites have aspects of social networking or community, and you'd be right. But I say if the primary purpose is media sharing, it's a social media site.

News sources are about timely or topical content.

Much has been made of the demise of traditional media the past couple years. Flava says, "Don't believe the hype!" Traditional media isn't going anywhere, but it is adapting to emerging complementary sources of news, information, and commentary. News sources are diversifying--many more people are publishing content, and content is now both participatory and socially vetted.

Popularity engines capture a collective sense of their users' preferences among resources, usually web links, and they present those resources in ranked lists that are normally designed to be dynamic, reflecting an up-to-date view into web content people find to be of interest.

There are two main types of popularity engine: Social bookmarking applications and collaborative filters. Social bookmarking applications, such as del.icio.us, value resources on the basis of individuals "saving" links to them. Users have individual collections of links, and those links acquire value when many individuals save them. Collaborative filters, such as Digg, are a little different: Users submit links for collective review, and the links acquire value based on a voting system of some kind.

The difference is important, because the types of content collected tend to be different. Social bookmarking sites tend to value resources of lasting value that users want to be able to find again, and collaborative filters tend to favor resources of short-term interest, such as timely news, and one-time interest, such as funny videos.

Marketplaces are about the exchange of goods and services, and information about good and services, among people.

The emerging marketplace is not about e-commerce web sites per se. We work on plenty of e-com sites, and I love them. But what we learn over and over again in the usability lab is that real people, especially making a purchase decision that involves more than a few bucks, use many web sites to gather information. There's a complex web ecosystem that supports purchase decisions, and strategists for individual web sites need to understand those ecosystems to plan effectively.

The new marketplace is about more than the site, more than the message, more than the differentiating feature. The marketplace is a cluster of interrelated sites, and the seller is regarded with what can only be described as a healthy suspicion. Caveat emptor is the online rule, but the news is that the emptor has some serious caveats to pay attention to. Customer reviews on sellers' sites are a new norm, and expert reviews from third-party sites play a critical role, especially for complex or technical products. And beyond expertise, trusted relationships are key information sources.

So transactional sites matter, but in a new way: The seller / manufacturer is regarded as having authoritative factual information about the product, but the expert or the existing customer is regarded as having the authoritative opinion or valuation about the product. And the closer the relationship, the more trusted the opinion. Get used to it.

But don't just get used to it, learn to facilitate it: If you've got a great product, you want people to know. If you don't, find a new job.

 

There's plenty of gray area between these types I'm putting forward. In fact, you might even say social space on the web is mostly gray area--and the overlap among types seems to be increasing rather than decreasing as the large sites add features. It's more and more common for social media sites to include communities (e.g., groups on Flickr), for social networks to include media hosting, (e.g. MySpace videos), and even for popularity engines to include blogs (e.g. Newsvine's "greenhouse").  People instant message links to product views, solicit advice from their contact lists, and so on.

You might even say the gray areas between sites and between types of sites hold the real opportunities for marketers to develop services that matter, create value, and drive engagement.

But I think it's still useful to think about think about these sites in terms of types, mostly as a way of focusing attention on the features you care about. Because while these things are not necessarily strictly distinct as types of site, they are distinct in terms of their uses.

Marketers wanting to engage with the social web need to know the differences in order to engage in ways that meet goals. To me, this is the essence of strategy: Know precisely what you want to accomplish, and craft approaches that rigorously focus on accomplishing it.

Setting Up a Corporate Blog: Easy as 1,2,3

Readers familiar with my sense of humor will recognize the title of this post as being, of course, tongue-in-cheek. Like anything worth doing, setting up a corporate blog is difficult. There are numerous issues to work through, from technological to legal—not to mention selling blogging through the gauntlet of marketing, PR, and executive circles in the first place, no small feat in many corporate contexts.

Without a doubt, the biggest challenge in creating a corporate blog is to secure active participation and engagement from authors who can contribute great content.

Still, there are some steps you can take to increase the likelihood of a your blogging program succeeding. Here it is, the three-step breakdown! (Is there anything that can't be turned into an "easy as 1,2,3" blog post?)

 

Step 1: Cultivate Content Authors

Identify a core group of blog contributors, and get them engaged. To the extent possible, formalize their blogging efforts as part of their jobs. Give them public recognition.

Remember, the best people to blog aren't the people with the words "Director of" in their job titles. This is a common mistake--but directors, managers, VPs and the like are busy, and they often aren't as engaged with the work practice as they are with leading and managing. They're probably the people least likely to blog consistently. However, they're probably the people who are best qualified to help you identify the real contributors.

What you're looking for are people with two key qualities: Passion for the work, and comfort expressing themselves in writing.

Stay in constant touch with your core group. Send them links. Ask them for their opinions. Give them ownership.

But don't let the core group become an exclusive group. Extend the invitation to contribute as broadly as you can. Actively solicit contributions from new authors--you never know who might catch fire and become a consistent contributor.

 

Step 2: Create an Editorial Calendar

What we're talking about here is not a proscriptive list of posts you'd like to have written, but an "inspiration list" of topic ideas to help contributors think of stuff to write about.

Get your core group together, and brainstorm a list. This early conversation will help get everybody on the same page about what kinds of things will be included in the blog. You should emphasize the opportunity to address a breadth of topics and stress the freedom of individual authors to take their writing in any direction they feel is appropriate.

Show your core group a couple sample posts from blogs you like, including both short and long posts. Emphasize that a wide range of posts is desirable--folks should be think about their effort as more akin to writing an email than writing a white paper, but a few white-paper level posts won't hurt a thing.

 

Step 3: Develop Guidelines, Policies, and Processes

Editorial guidelines are about communicating your requirements as clearly as possible to authors. It's about helping them understand the legal and ethical requirements, and it's the place to communicate the line between appropriate and inappropriate content.

Your policy, on the other hand, is a legal document. Have a lawyer help you with it. Publish it on your blog. There are some specific requirements about copyright, privacy, and so forth that you need to address.

In terms of process, you need to figure out what level of editorial support you'll provide authors. At a minimum, it's a good idea to approve posts before publishing them, so at least two sets of eyes confirm every post's compliance with your policies. At the other end of the spectrum, highly-engaged editorial support can make it easier for authors to crank out content while ensuring high quality--and don't worry, a good editor won't dampen the individuality of your authors' voices.

Lastly, create an explicit policy for moderation. You need clearly-communicated rules about what comments can be published, and you need to enforce the rules consistently and transparently. I encourage you to think very liberally about publishing critical comments.

 

That's it. A very boiled-down step-by-step to get started. For more, I recommend you pick up The Corporate Blogging Book. I've just started reading it, but it's good and very thorough.

The Big Leap: New Mactopia Site Integrates Community

Yesterday we launched a major client site that has a couple important community features. Hopefully the level of complexity involved isn't apparent on the site itself, but I'm proud of the work, because we did some complicated stuff.

Meet the new Mactopia, the web home of MacBU, the Microsoft group that creates software for the Mac:

This site is a great example of a business moving from a broadcast to a participatory model on the web. The old site had little more than a web email form supporting customer interaction: Click Submit to send your message into oblivion. Today the new site includes numerous access points for customer interaction, all serving core user requirements, dynamically layered throughout the site, algorithmically filtered, and aligned with the brand.

Two new areas of the site support direct interaction among customers and between customers and the company:

• The existing NNTP technical support groups are now mirrored on the site itself, in a web-based forums interface that adds features to make them easier to use. They synch in both directions, and discussion threads are now searchable along with other support content.
• The popular Mac Mojo blog, formerly hosted on MSDN, is fully integrated with the new site, and the best content from the blog is dynamically integrated with product pages, providing a way for people considering a purchase to look under the hood, ask questions, and get to know the people and thinking behind the products.

To integrate these areas of the site in a meaningful way, we had a number of challenges to solve:

• The existing NNTP groups were working. We had to keep from breaking them.
• The MVP community, crucial contributors of technical support and general help for Mac Office users, strongly prefers to interact with the NNTP groups through a newsreader interface--which is an inappropriate interface for the users they're there to help.
• Support Forums created by the community and Help content published by the company serve the same user need: Get a solution to a problem. The two kinds of content needed to be differentiated, so authorship is clear. But there's no way to know whether a given question has the best answer in one place or the other.
• While the Support Forums and Help content are both searchable, there's no way to rank search results by relevance across the two areas, and the databases being searched return differently-structured data.
• Integrating the blog with the main site means many people who aren't familiar with blog conventions will encounter it. We needed to present the most broadly interesting content, along with the standard newest content, front and center.

This list is really just the tip of the iceberg, and I think it's interesting because these are challenges typical to any large project that involves integration of community content. We had to make compromises every step of the way. Only time will tell, but I think the site architecture will support great quality over the long term--thanks in large part to the passion and smarts of the fine folks at the MacBU.

MacBU took a huge step here by opening the site to user participation. They'll face huge challenges over the next year as they adjust to a brave new world of customer relationships online. A lot will depend on their ability to stay responsive in the face of a huge volume of questions and requests (the old site's monthly traffic was already in seven digits). They'll face tough questions about how to moderate borderline posts. Their commitment to transparency will be tested. They'll be unfairly treated.

All this adds up to a big opportunity. So pay attention. This is a ride almost everybody's in line for.

The Members Project: Branded, Participatory, Corporate Charity Campaign

A colleague pointed out American Express' The Members Project to me yesterday, and I am pretty impressed with the concept. It's the only example I've seen of a major corporation launching an online community to execute a charitable activity in an unabashedly branded environment, with banner ads--and not seeming to pander to or exploit customers' altruistic instincts.

It's also only one of two great examples I've seen of a many-to-one modality in online community, where customers speak collectively to the corporation. (The other one is Dell's IdeaStorm.)

The basic idea is American Express will donate a dollar for every participant to a charitable project suggested by a participant and selected by the community. American Express pays a dollar for your attention, and you help decide what to do with the dollar.

And brilliantly, your dollar is pooled with the dollars of all the other participants. Collectively you decide how your dollars should be used. Collective intelligence identifies the worthiest idea, and your experience as a participant is of belonging to a group doing something wothwhile--which just happens to be branded. You're working in partnership with Amex to decide how to donate some money. You like your partner.

What works so well here for me is the comfortable relationship between the brand and the activity. American Express isn't trying to trick you into thinking it's a nonprofit foundation that only pretends to be a huge, wealthy corporation. It's simply buying your attention (pretty darn cheaply) and engaging you in an activity you can feel sort of good about.

A big part of the effectiveness of the idea is that American Express hands over some control to customers. It respects your collective ability to make a rational choice. Your participation feels meaningful, unscripted.

Amex gets eyeballs on its ads and collects goodwill, customers participate in a positive activity, and a good idea gets funded.

This, rarest of birds, is corporate Web 2.0 done well.

The Basics of Online Community Measurement and Analysis

There are a number of ways to think about measuring the value of your online community, and ROI is only one of them. ROI is, frankly, a head-scratcher, and most people in the online community world throw up their hands when it comes to thinking about how to dollarize their community initiatives. The reasoning goes: "We can't tie community participation to purchases, so instead we'll talk about community participation in terms of branding." I will, however, make a suggestion about how to show ROI that will work for some people in some contexts. 

Online Community Brand Lift Survey

The idea here is to get a sense of how exposure to a branded community experience affects brand perception. There are few on-site behaviors that give reliable qualitative measurements of brand perception, so analyzing visitor behavior isn't the best answer. In the usability lab, the tendency of participants to seek to please the test facilitator (the Hawthorne Effect) casts doubts on measurements of brand perception. 

A series of surveys are the answer. Start with an entry survey that gives you a measurement of brand perception prior to exposure to the community site, and follow up with an exit survey measuring brand perception after exposure to the community site. 

You have to do this right for it to work. Find a qualified researcher in your organization, hire a partner, or get yourself an intern graduate student with a background that includes research using surveys. You want to present the entry and exit surveys to different groups of people, for example, and make sure the survey is written in a way that gathers exactly the information you want to have. It's not rocket science, but it's a little harder than, say, Algebra. 

Another critical consideration for your exit survey is to think about what site behaviors qualify users to participate. In other words, How engaged with the community site, at a minimum, do users need to be for you to expect the experience to influence their perception of your brand? Obviously, folks who land on your home page by accident and immediately leave shouldn't be seeing your exit survey--their perception of your brand hasn't likely been influenced. But how much engagement is reasonable to expect? Over 20 seconds on the home page? Fully completed profile, 5 return visits, posted original content? 

What is engagement, anyway, and how do you know it when you see it? 

Online Community Engagement Index

Here's an approach to measuring participants' degree of engagement with your site. Start by making a list of all the important trackable actions on your site. Here are some examples: 

• Home page view 
• Detail page view 
• Profile view 
• Download file 
• View video 
• Register 
• Add comment

You can also include measures like time on site, number of page views, and more. And you should include important combinations of actions, like registration followed by return visit.

Next, rank the actions in order of degree of engagement. For example, registration usually reflects less engagement than completing a profile, posting video content reflects more engagement than commenting on a video, and so on. 

If you want to get fancy about it, you can do a weighted ranking, where for example uploading a photo for your profile counts 5 times more than filling in a where-do-you-live field. 

For a simpler approach, you can group actions into 3-5 categories reflecting different degrees of engagement. (This is a relative measure, so precise numbers about degree of engagement are less important than consistently measuring engagement over time and above all taking action to increase engagement.) 

Then, you can tally up your users' scores. There are lots of ways to slice up the index--median by month, week, day, quarter, year; median among content contributors, registered users, lurkers; proportion of users above and below certain thresholds. Community engagement is a rich measure that can teach you a lot about your site. 

And where the learning really gets significant is as you look at the changes over time and across iterations of the site. You can get powerful feedback about how your site management affects the experience of your community. 

One could say engagement is a good thing in and of itself, and I think that's generally true. But when it comes time to pitch for budget dollars, "engagement" doesn't necessarily get you past the skeptical VP. 

The Holy Grail: Return on Community Investment

Here's a way to think about ROI in terms of the relationship between engagement and dollarized conversion. The logic is to show conversion relative to engagement, that is, the degree to which people are more valuable to your business the more engaged they are with your community. 

If your community site has an e-commerce component, or your community is woven throughout your larger site experience, it's easy to look at the relationships between engagement and conversion rate, average order value, and so on. If not, the story gets a little more complicated. 

In the consulting business, we're increasingly working with clients to coordinate constellations of web sites, and tracking behavior across those constellations is part of the leading edge in web analysis. Here's a conceptual picture of how some of this works: 

   

Understanding the relationship between community engagement and dollarized conversion enables you to calculate the value of a customer who's engaged with the community compared to the value of a customer who isn't. From there you can look at the total number of community participants, total up their relative value, and subtract the cost of the community. Poof! ROI. 

Some words of caution. This approach doesn't tell you: 

• The long-term value of engagement. 
• The value of brand lift produced by community. 
• The value of community participants' influence on non-participants.

These are important caveats. It's critical to remember that for community, ROI isn't the whole picture.

And, this approach isn't trivial to implement. You'll need solid in-house expertise or a qualified partner.

Nonetheless, contrary to what some might tell you, and despite the complexity, it IS possible to calculate ROI for some community web sites when you need to show the VP that dollar-sign bottom line. It's a powerful basis for goal setting--and for holding yourself accountable.

For additional reading about site analysis and measurement, I highly recommend the blog of my respected colleague, Anil Batra, along with that of analytics luminary Avinash Kaushik. For in-depth reading, check out Actionable Web Analytics, a new book from (full disclosure) colleagues of mine at ZAAZ.

Show Us Your Wow: Getting It Wrong

I'm not a Microsoft basher, not at all. And, I'm not one to charge around the Web looking for stuff to criticize. However, their Show Us Your Wow campaign strikes me as getting a fundamental thing instructively wrong about corporate-sponsored community.

The basic idea is a photo contest, and the photos are displayed via an interaction that simulates the Windows Flip 3D feature in Vista. The site seems to have been a mild success, with about 50,000 submissions (less then half, interestingly, from the US). However, browsing the site is slow and clunky. You can rate photos, but there seems to have been low participation in the ratings mechanism. You can't comment on photos. My guess is that most participants simply submitted a photo and disappeared.

Now, I do think the relative silence of the "community community" about this site is telling. Nobody got excited about this site, so it was ignored. However, there's a key lesson in Show Us Your Wow that is so perfectly exemplified that I think it's worth talking about. Web 2.0 aspiring corporations take note:

 

IT'S NOT ABOUT YOU

 

Show Us Your Wow has a concept that's good-sorta. It wants to be about "When you experience the amazing, the incredible, the exhilarating. And when you do, there's only one way to express it: 'Wow.'"

Who can't get behind that? It's not a stretch to feel like the Wow concept can be expressed in pictures, and pictures are easy to upload, so there's a low threshold of entry. The concept is brand-aligned, which is a key attribute of successful corporate community initiatives. (See the Converse user-generated film gallery. Navigate to Features > Made By You.)

But there's a problem:

Microsoft is asking you to show them your Wow. Aside from sounding a little off-color (especially in translation), do you really care about showing your amazing, incredible, exhilarating moment... to faceless Microsoft employees somewhere in cramped Redmond offices? Probably not.

Now, you might want to show your Wow to family and friends. You might want to show your Wow, even, to other people out there in the world. But the site is neither messaged or built that way. It's an archetypal example of the corporation wanting to do something community-enabled and just not getting it: "Hey customers! Send your most special memories to our corporate PR department!"

And just in case you aren't into just showing us your Wow because you love us, we'll make sure you want to... by bribing you with a prize offering.

Stay tuned for my next installment, where I'll break down another community site that does something similar and nails it.

First Try at Web 2.0? Three Ways to Go Small and Win Big

Many of our clients are dipping their toes in the turbid waters of the participatory web for the first time. They know they need to think about community, and they want to be part of Web 2.0--but they've heard horror stories. Dollars wasted, jobs lost, companies humiliated. Oh, and the budget for this year is already set. We can't afford ongoing moderation. And what about people saying bad things about us on our site? What about crummy content? What will Legal say? What will the brand people say? What if we throw a huge party and nobody shows up?

There are a lot of reasons it's hard to revolutionize a company's web strategy to include customer participation. Too many to list. Here are three ways to make it easier:

Sociablize Your Content (I think I used a made-up word there! )

Many sites already have valuable content. One way to enable customer participation without building a whole new site is to enable interaction and engagement with what you've already got. If you've got educational webcasts, enable commenting. Add a threaded discussion.

Build a Walled Garden

It's risky to redesign your site in a revolutionary new way. It takes a lot of money and a lot of organizational support. So start in a discrete part of the existing site, or build a microsite. If it fails, you can just pull the plug and, if it's really failing, nobody will be there to notice.

Run an Event

Instead of building a community in a small place, you can build a community for a short time. Find an event that's important to your customers, whether it's a trade show, a product release, or an appearance by a celebrity, and build a venue for your customers to engage with it. When the event is over, the community can disappear or be archived. (Just make sure nobody's surprised when you pull the plug!)

There are lots of ways to limit scope and minimize risk. The point is that when you want to change the world, one effective way to go is to start small. Prove the concept by making clear goals at the outset and measuring them. Dollarize and measure ROI, so when you're ready to go for the big ask, you've got money data and a proven success.