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June 08, 2006
Google and the quest for community competence, Pt. 2
So you convinced the CEO (or yourself) to make community a core competency of your organization. Now what? There are three ways to tackle it.
1. Incubate it.
Start
internally. The affordability and ease of social media tools make it
easy to launch community experiments. Get thee to a wiki. Bless thee with a blog!
The IT group may argue it can create better tools than what social software vendors create themselves. Possibly, but unlikely. With your mandate from the CEO, accentuate the need for speed. A good experimental timeframe is 3-6 months.
For your internal experiments, set up baseline metrics that migrate easily to external efforts. You'll want metrics because the CEO will ask for them. Here's a starting batch:
- Number of registered users. How does the number compare, percentage-wise, to the potential number of users?
- Contribution rates and percentages. If you can exceed the 1 Percent Rule, you're doing well.
- Synthesis rate. The number or percentage of people who comment on, modify or edit posted content. If you're exceeding 10 percent of total users, you're doing well.
- Page views. You'll quickly discover the hot topics and information gaps.
- Referral sources. Who is sending you the most traffic? Bring them into the team.
- Content value ratings. Digg has mastered this.
When you're ready to graduate from incubation to customer-community rollout, include baseline metrics such as:
- Correlation rates. Do people who participate in your community efforts buy more, or less, than people who do not?
- Community segments. Based on your existing customer segments, who participates the most and least in your community efforts? Create participation-to-purchase deciles.
You could include purchase intent rates of community members to non-members, but I think intent measures are meaningless.
2. Evolve it.
Organizations with some community-building
experience such as customer advisory boards, blogs or user conferences
are on the right path.
But the community core competency development should be assigned to a senior company leader, who shares her knowledge regularly with the company via -- what else -- the company blog.
Here's a community leader model: Eva Peron. By that I mean someone who wields influence because of her knowledge and ability to form alliances and partnerships in service to the core competency's cause. Her visibility -- internally and externally -- and dedication to the cause contributes to her success.
Not everyone in the company will like it, just as not everyone in Argentina liked Eva Peron (but plenty more did). It's polarizing, but that's the way it is. The community leader cannot be a Milton.
3. Acquire it.
Acquiring community as a core competency is a viable strategy. It's Yahoo's strategy with social media, and
it defines their acquisitions of Flickr, Del.icio.us and Webjay. That's why
NewsCorp acquired MySpace.
None of the acquired companies were big moneymakers (to the stereotypical dismay of Wall Street analysts), but their core competencies are what the corporate chiefs see as future strategic dynamos for growth. To Terry Semel and Rupert Murdoch, community is the inflection point between mere existence as a static search provider or broadcaster to a facilitator of audience engagement.
Bonus list: What makes community efforts flourish? Our sensei, Guy Kawasaki, has a great list of eight ideas.
1. Create something worth building a community around.
2. Identify and recruit your thunderlizards -- immediately!
3. Assign one person the task of building a community.
4. Give people something concrete to chew on.
5. Create an open system.
6. Welcome criticism.
7. Foster discourse.
8. Publicize the existence of the community.
Other blogs that reference Google and the quest for community competence, Pt. 2:
» Community as a Core Competency from Certified Association Executive
Communities grow up from the grass roots. They can\'t be spoken into existence by a company or organization. That\'s why I recommend staying on the lookout for communities that are already developing and finding ways to get involved. Why? Because culti... [Read More]
» My Prediction Stands from Marketing Headhunter.com
My buddy Michael Keleman (AKA The Recruiting Animal) sent me this link from ClickZ. The article points to a prediction I made two days ago: Is there a chance that Jobster would shift to using the Recruiting.com brand, a notion [Read More]
» Looking for community, use your own from Inside the Cubicle
Ben McConnell at Church of the Consumer Blog says what I have been saying all along. What is the best way for your company to get involved in communities?Start internally. The affordability and ease of social media tools make it easy to launch communit... [Read More]
» DIY: Community from Vidize.com
In my experience, most companies come out as very poor shepherds when it comes to communities. Case in point: I was reviewing Adobes live docs for Flash Media Server 2. There wasnt a SINGLE comment on any of the docs I viewed. Im n... [Read More]
My trackback didn't take, but I've posted some thoughts about this over on my blog:
http://caeexam.blogspot.com/2006/06/community-as-core-competency.html
Ben -- We had turned on comment and trackback approval awhile back since we'd been getting hit with a flood of both. Sorry for the delay. Your trackbacks are good to go.
