Building the business case for online communities
13th May 2009, 10:30 pm by Helen Trim
I’m at the Communities 2.0 conference in San Francisco this week. It’s such a beautiful and diverse city and sadly not enough time to explore (sigh).
One of the hot topics raised at the ROI symposium was the thorny issue of getting internal buy in for your online community from across departments and management levels. At FreshNetworks a lot of the early work with our clients is around supporting the project sponsor to achieve this. It’s often the hardest part of getting an online community started and even when you are rolling, how do you keep the visibility of it high to ensure continued investment?
I’ve been struck by the number of passionate mavericks I’ve met who ‘just knew’ their company should be starting a dialogue with customers (or employees) and could see the benefits a mile away even if they couldn’t quantify them. Euan Semple started the BBC intranet on a box under his desk and the seasoned community practitioner Dawn Lacallade (previously Lead Stormchaser at Dell and now at solarwinds) tirelessly waded through the politics at Dell to extol the benefits of the early Dell communities. Many social media projects start as skunkworks projects and sometimes this is the only way to gather the evidence that the demand and the benefits are there. I’m all in favour of piloting, learning and evolving but there can be some pitfalls:
- you may end up with multiple communities targeting the same people, creating real confusion for your customers
- as social media people leave the company, community ghost towns will appear as no-one knew about all the cul-de-sacs of conversations existed and there’s no-one to carry on the conversation
- social media enthusiasts may be good at Twitter but they may not understand how to manage risk. Online communities can impact all areas of the business and there is nothing worse for a customer who has made the effort to talk to you than getting no response back from the brand.
So here are some tips from Dawn about how she used her powers of persuasion at Dell (at solarwinds everything they do starts with ‘how do we involve customers in this’ so I gather life is less complicated for her now!). I’ve added to the list from some of our experiences at FreshNetworks too.
- Amongst the other skills you need as a community manager, you need to develop your sales skills! Equip yourself with loads of great case studies to convince stakeholder of the value to the business. They are unlikely to respond to words like blog, wiki – only to phrases like customer retention and cost reduction!
- Identify all the key stakeholders in the business (i.e. those that give you money, those that can vote on what you are about to do and those that are likely to give you grief!)
- Meet/call/survey these people to understand the priorities of the business and each department. At FreshNetworks we try to encourage setting up a cross-functional team to attend at least a half day workshop, including directors. It’s amazing how many epiphany moments happen when people are sharing ideas with each other and often the biggest cynics walk away as converts and later evangelize the project. Play back to the group what phase 1 is going to cover and what it’s not to set expectations.
- Prioritise the objectives and work out the business KPIs for the community. Use the language of your stakeholders. If the KPIs don’t contribute to departmental goals you are unlikely to get support for the project. KPIs include things like ‘reduce acquisition costs’ not ‘number of top contributors’. The latter is an essential metric for managing a community but unlikely to mean much to a management team under pressure to deliver their quarterly targets! And finally remember – value is fluid. I met Tina Card this week, another driven community manager from Scottrade who told me their community is producing benefits that hadn’t even envisaged at the outset.
- Test the business readiness. Is the company committed to investing in the medium term to develop the community to maturity and value? Have you thought through the internal process changes that might be required to respond to say an ideas community?
- Launch a beta then work hard to play back the results to your stakeholders. And never stop doing this, get in front of Execs on a regular basis. There are a lot of repetitive tasks involved in managing a community and marketing people particularly are not used to this as they live in a campaign-based world.
We’d love to hear about your experiences so we can continue to add to the list!
Some more reading
- Three Things About Social Media Every Business Should Know (mediabullseye.com)
- FASTforward’09 Interview: Euan Semple, independent advisor on social computing (fastforwardblog.com)
- Build your own community or go where people are? Do both (freshnetworks.com)
For social media agency support get in touch or follow us on Twitter.
Jenni Beattie:
Great post. I particularly agree with your point about multi-displinary team being at the table. The issue of ownership often seen as simply a marketing tool goes much further beyond that across to R&D, CRM etc so its important to incorporate all those key individuals.
Cheers
14 May 2009, 1:32 amBuilding the business case for online communities « Fredzimny’s CCCCC Blog:
[...] http://www.freshnetworks.com/blog/2009/05/building-the-business-case-for-online-communities 13th May 2009, 10:30 pm by Helen [...]
14 May 2009, 4:44 amSteve Bridger:
Insightful post, Helen. Thank you.
You’re right to stress the importance of cross-functional buy-in from the beginning. Some online communities fail because that are not started as a cross-business initiative, and so are not plugged in to other initiatives.
It’s also critical where in an organisation the ‘community’ team belongs (if you’re lucky to have a ‘team’). In my experience, organisations are still poor at distributing trust and assigning individuals within departments to participate and communicate conversationally, and take ownership for implementing and monitoring engagement strategies.
There is a good argument for establishing a cross-functional participation / engagement / community team function (online and offline) as an autonomous unit in its own right (with a seat at the top table??) that works to infuse participation and community building across the organisation.
I think it should be in people’s job descriptions to dedicate at least half an hour a day to participating in their own community. Inviting people to contribute to a community and to then not participate yourself is like inviting people to a party with no one serving at the bar. It’s a lost opportunity, and one that could prove costly.
What do you think?
14 May 2009, 5:15 amatul chatterjee:
We need to look at groups which exist with commonalities but are not linked tightly. One example people who own homes (not appartments). People who play bridge online.
14 May 2009, 7:54 amNow if you form communities based on these two the essential persons are those who will take responsibility of undertaking tasks. Usually there are a few only who will do that, the rest will chip in.
As far as laying down half and hour a day or so, this could well be half and hour a week for the first 10 weeks and then step it up. This will be determined by your agenda.
In a meeting which is scheduled to last for 2 hours we quite often decide on the final areas of decisions in the first 10 minutes. So the agenda of the community can be firmed up in the first four weeks, through a weekly meeting circulation of drafts and a lot of cross talk.
atul chatterjee:
We need to look at groups which exist with commonalities but are not linked tightly. One example people who own homes (not appartments). People who play bridge online.
14 May 2009, 8:28 amNow if you form communities based on these two the essential persons are those who will take responsibility of undertaking tasks. Usually there are a few only who will do that, the rest will chip in.
As far as laying down half and hour a day or so, this could well be half and hour a week for the first 10 weeks and then step it up. This will be determined by your agenda.
In a meeting which is scheduled to last for 2 hours we quite often decide on the final areas of decisions in the first 10 minutes. So the agenda of the community can be firmed up in the first four weeks, through a weekly meeting circulation of drafts and a lot of cross talk.
BTW I love your blog!
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16 May 2009, 12:04 amNina Card:
Great post, Helen. The first tip on getting executive buy-in is a key one. You have to get buy-in for the community project and often that does mean sharpening your sales skills to present a strong case to your executive team. And, you have to speak their language (customer retention, Cost reduction, ROI, etc)
In response to Steve’s comments –
We found tremendous value in having featured members (our product managers) participate in our community. Clients are more engaged when they know they are talking directly to decision makers and their feedback can and often does make a difference. It didn’t take long before community participation became part of their daily responsibilities.
Thanks for the insights everyone.
21 May 2009, 5:04 pmlinks for 2009-06-03 « Using technology in the voluntary and community sector:
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