Category: online interaction

Forrester’s Online Community Best Practices

Last week I wrote briefly about the recent Forrester report on building online communities for marketing. Jeremiah Owyang followed up with me and gave me a copy of the report to read. House painting derailed my intent to read it last week and and post my thoughts, but a few quiet hours before Northern Voice in my room up here in Vancouver BC finally gives me the opportunity to reflect on the report.

First, it is a very nice compilation of solid, basic advice on building commercially oriented communities. There isn’t anything particularly unique about the content. It is common sense you can find by combing through what is offered on the net. As usual, the value is in the compilation. But here is where I have to confess. I have read VERY few analyst reports. I work in the non profit world where such products are rarely affordable. I think I had this fantasy idea of what they would be like. I expected some secret sauce. Maybe I know online communities so well that I forget that this stuff is NOT basic knowledge. So I have to wonder about the market for analysts reports. Clearly I am naive!

That said, here are the things that struck me as highs and lows of the report.

Highs:

  • It is succinct. Something I am terrible at! 🙂
  • It focuses on the community members and their needs – be in service to your community
  • It offers sound advice for both resourcing a community and being clear on the goals and how they might be tracked. (I’d suggest linking to Beth Kanter’s great stuff on ROI. I need to find the links)
  • Solid advice on community management (very happy to see this validated)
  • A good attempt to frame community planning in terms of community activity needs rather than from a technology position.
  • I was THRILLED to see the advice to make sure you don’t get your community data locked into a platform. This is really important and a lot of people miss this one.

Some of my critiques:

  • As I mentioned in my previous blog post, the image about community growth does not give an accurate picture of community life cycle. Communities ebb and flow. Membership turns over. Communities do not grow out and out. It is more like a recursive spiral. Networks, however, can bring life into communities and nurture the emergence of new communities. They are far more scalable than communities, but harder to both measure and “manage.” Which leads me to my next point.
  • The report doesn’t fully address or distinguish this very interesting intersection of communities and networks. There is one mention of “a group within an existing social networking site” but this is a huge sweet spot. I suspect most commercial endeavors really want to foster both a network and the communities that form within it. (I define communities as a bounded set of people interacting with each other – not just with content – around some shared purpose over time. So one time use does not a community member make! ) If I were exploring an “online community” strategy for my company, I would not do it without a network strategy as well. I could prattle on about this forever, but I can’t miss the party tonight…
  • This raises the issue of identity, which wasn’t present in the report. Identity is a tough topic for an intro piece, but in the end, people define themselves by their identity as an individual (how they show up in a community) and as a member of a community (I am a member of the X community.) There is mention of profile tools, which help manifest identity, but not about how community hosts can nurture a sense of individual and group identity in a community. Identity is a core aspect of brand loyalty. So some attention to how identity shows up and can be nutured is a key strategy.
  • From a design standpoint, I think this point is made, but I also think it could be stronger. You need to work with your developers to develop both the technical AND social architecture. Some tools for example, while they look like “conversation” tools, in practice they aren’t and thus don’t support a social conversational architecture, even if the vendor claims they do. There are some great developers who really understand social architecture and there are a bunch who think they do. This is a slippery slope/trap.
  • Visual design is not mentioned. I used to dismiss this as secondary. Boy, was I wrong. Visual design that is appropriate to the target audience in critical. I learned this with http://www.shareyourstory.org. Visuals tie to identity, to navigation, and distinguish your community from the hundreds of others out there.
  • How to work with “the competition.” Like I said, there are hundreds of other communities out there. Is your strategy to work with or fight against that dynamic? Do you make it easy for your members to move across their communities or do you want to be their central community? The latter is getting harder and harder to do. That’s why (and the report mentions this) thinking about working with a FaceBook strategy might make sense. Having multiple ways for your members to interact in your community that make it easy, while still maintaining enough distinct identity that they IDENTIFY with you.

All in all, it is very cool to be able to read and publicly critique the report. Jeremiah walks the talk of transparency and participating and listening to his network and communities. It is only a pity that the readers of the report may not see this practice in action. It could inform their community strategy as much, if not more, than reading the report. Because supporting online communities is not a formula. It is a practice. And practices have to be… well… practiced!

Making Sense of Communities and Networks

Via a twit from Jeremiah Owyang I was led to a post from Nick O’Neill, Do Social Networks Follow the Traditional Business Cycle – Covering All That’s Social All the Web critiquing a recent report by Jeremiah. Jeremiah asked what we thought of Nick’s critique, particularly of the image from Jeremiah’s Forrester report.
Forrester Community Image

My response:

Since I can’t read the report, my response may be out of context. But I don’t think what the chart references is a community by my definition, which is a bounded set of people. (addition – actually, that’s only PART of my definition.) Communities don’t scale out and out.

Most commercial “communities” (which I assume Jeremiah is talking about) are actually networks and the people in them change over time. There may very likely be communities that form and persist over time as well, but their growth is never continually up. Then tend to find a stasis point which doesn’t change much.

The commercial networks right now may play out like this chart, but I think there is something specific and important that is not reflected in this chart and that is the challenge of multi-membership and the proliferation of network alternatives.

Right now, for example, social network sites are hot and have a huge growth. But we are starting to see the fatigue (too many widgets, to many alerts and messages with no granularity to their usefulness or aggregation in ways that makes sense to the individual, my friend just invited me to another network, my “friend” who I don’t really know started spamming me.)

No amount of ongoing management and continual improvements is going to be able to control the impact and draw/drain of the larger market of networks. It can fight against it, but the fact is people are fickle and will move on.

The differentiation will be those sub communities that form and persist. One strategy to explore is how to create the welcoming space for those communities, and expect the number of communities to grow, rather than the size of any one community.

Then you have not one single upward curve, but many that weave into a successful vortex that persists even though MANY people will come and go.

An example of this is the Share Your Story community at http://www.shareyourstory.org

I get a bit concerned about the hyping of community as well. This is more an intuitive than logical data-driven response, but the image above is more hype than reality as it stands on its own. I’d love to see it reframed from a network perspective which I think is both more scalable and sustainable.

Then I tweeted that I thought, out of context, the image was a bit of a hype. Jeremiah then direct-tweeted me to offer more context. I love context. So now I have a copy of the Forrester report to read, thank you, Jeremiah. It is printed out for weekend reading on the sofa. Jeremiah said I could blog about it, although the report itself is proprietary (a paid product of Forrester.) So stay tuned. I think it is important to share what we understand about communities and networks.

Hopping Between Notetaking and Backchannel Conversations

One of the practices that is part of my daily routine in communities and teams which use phone calls for meetings, is to take notes in a chat environment. I am really good at capturing notes so I’m often one of the note takers. I find typing increases my attentiveness and listening. Otherwise I’m prone to multitasking (email, checking twitter, writing blog posts. Should I admit I started writing this post while on a telecon?)

What I’ve noticed is that I’ve started to use the chat as back channel for voicing my own input and thoughts. This is more like the “backchannel” used by techie communities, particularly during face to face events. It is another layer of conversation that enables more than one person to “talk” at the same time. It is also useful in web meetings. Back channel, of course, has it’s risks too — fractured attention and a channel for mocking etc — but it is different from the note taking practice. One is a record, the other is part of the conversation. One represents the voices of others, the other IS the voices.

When I mix the two, I start wondering, am I compromising the note taking with my comments and input? Or am I adding richness and voice to the proceedings? Am I strengthening the conversation by adding text input and not interrupting, or am I undermining the speaker? All these are possible. So how does this inform my choices in my practice?

This duality reminds me of this “two hatted” feeling I get when I am in a facilitator role. I often feel I am not fully devoting myself to facilitation if I put my participant hat on. When I do, I do it explicitly. I am wondering, should I do that when I shift in chat, or does that just add more noise to a fast flowing chat?

What do you think?

Photo by Salvor