Chapter 16

Nurturing Online Communities

Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy, and mutual valuing.

—Rollo May

In the early days of commerce, people sat around the pot-bellied stoves of the general stores, arguing, spitting, sipping, swapping stories and gossip, sharing horse sense, and building lasting relationships amongst themselves (and the stores). Many stores even had separate benches for Republicans and Democrats. We’ve devoted an entire book to helping understand how to translate successful relationship building techniques from the real world to the digital world. How can an organization capture some of the ethos of the old general store in our digital efforts?

The answer is an online community.

The Online Community as “Virtual Physical Presence”

Digital communities exemplify a number of characteristics found in that old general store:

• Conversation: Instead of aisles of products and separate benches, the digital community has rooms or channels. But people are still arguing, talking, and sharing. There are conversations between people (trying to solve their own problems) and conversations with people and organization associates.
• Commerce: It’s not impossible to integrate products directly into the community experience so that people can “browse” shelves, jump into a conversation, and go back to browsing (or purchasing).
• Assistance: When the community is integrated with the larger digital presence, seeking assistance is only a button or link away. Imagine someone on your website looking at a product and having questions. Instead of navigating somewhere else, the person could enter his or her question in a box that, when submitted, takes him or her immediately into the community while giving the option to return to the product page.
• Content: In the retail store, maybe these are flyers, handouts, displays, catalogs, and brochures. But in the digital world, all we have is content. That same content that’s on your website can also be part of your community included in blog posts or other static pages.

F5 DevCentral—A Community Example

In the late 2000s, F5 Networks nurtured their community, DevCentral, from meager beginnings to over 100,000 members in less than five years. (See Figure 16.1.)

Figure 16.1 DevCentral: Building an Online Community

Today, F5’s DevCentral community boasts over 120,000 members, who share code, access a wealth of information, and encourage each other through contests, awards, intrinsic and extrinsic rewards, and recognition. All are welcome, including competitors. This goes back to authenticity and credibility. An organization that openly accepts competitors into its community acknowledges that it has nothing to hide. It’s transparent. And, quite surprising, competitors engaging with the community can actually help strengthen the trust bonds between the organization and community participants.

As an organization of only 3,500 people, F5 only facilitates and contributes to this vast peer-to-peer community (versus dictating and trying to control it). Members can develop professional recognition based on their technical expertise, and their willingness to help others. It’s not surprising to see mention of a high “community standing” (i.e., an MVP) on someone’s LinkedIn profile or resume, especially when the community is in his or her industry.

At the company’s occasional physical get-togethers, these high level contributors are often elevated and find themselves at the beginning of long lines of fans, who are waiting to speak with them, get an autograph, or a have their picture taken with their technical “idols.”

The power of this form of community has both pros and cons. Benefits include early access to customer feedback and ideation, evangelism and advocacy to assist the sales process, and reduced support expenses as the community members help themselves through problems that otherwise would generate trouble tickets in customer service. This is one of the ultimate goals of a community—peer-to-peer conversations that add credibility to the product without the organization having to contribute content. And because community discussions can be searchable, this user-generated content, which is really just a conversation, can become some of that helpful, expert content that audiences may stumble upon later.

Downsides include the aforementioned release of the community’s valuable technical knowledge to competitors, the need to meet the audience’s appetite for new and interesting information, and the potential for widespread backlash from a large expert and engaged community if the organization stumbles.

As DevCentral grew, F5 quickly found it needed a team of dedicated personnel to maintain the site, and create content to “feed the beast.” The payoff in the investment, though, was loyalty. And it paid off big.

Negative Feedback (the Elephant in the Room)

Every organization that considers starting a community has gone through a conversation about how to handle negative feedback. Should they prune negative messages? Should they block users who consistently post negative responses? The answer to all questions about limiting community posts to only positive responses is “no.” With clear policies and guidelines around posting, responses can be pruned that violate those guidelines. When negative responses are part of the discussion, it adds authenticity and also enables the loyal community members the opportunity to “sound off” against contraopinions.

Building Trust at Scale

We talked in Chapter 11 about transparency and how Domino’s acknowledged how their customers felt, and committed to changing. Although they did that through traditional advertising and a national marketing campaign, a community can serve the same purpose. For example, in a recent email exchange between the CEO of Limelight Networks, Bob Lento, and a concerned customer, a discussion ensued about financial stability, the state of the company, and recent rumors about layoffs. Instead of trying to dodge the questions or redirect the conversation, Mr. Lento was forthright and honest about the state of affairs and cleared up misconceptions the customer had regarding the state of the company. But it didn’t stop there. Instead of hiding the email exchange, Limelight published it on their blog for everyone to see, forever immortalizing it as part of its community.1

Where to Start

Many commercial systems, such as Jive,2 Lithium,3 GetSatisfaction,4 and Bloomfire5 now offer community development platforms through software-as-a-service (SaaS) with varying degrees of features, scale, and cost. There are also free and shareware supported software systems such as Dolphin6 and Jomsocial7 that can be used to develop communities. There are a number of technical decisions to make regarding which direction to take that are outside the scope of this book, but care should be taken especially in the areas of security and scalability. The key is not to box yourself into a platform that can’t grow with your organization (i.e., your long-term need to detail analytics may require you to get a platform now that exceeds your projected community population but provides the robust analytics you know you will need later). But more significant than the technological underpinnings is the structural, people, and process issues that must be designed, developed, coordinated, and managed in order to build a successful online community. A community isn’t just a piece of software, and getting a community in place is really about five steps:

Step One: Define Business Purpose and Goals

This first step answers a very essential and fundamental question: “Why do you want a community?”

Is the purpose solely to reduce support costs? Then a knowledge base, posting technical docs, bug fixes, and technical tips might be the more appropriate focus. Is the goal to sell more gear? Then invest in the corporate website and marketing automation. Communities can increase revenues, but most likely not through directly selling products within the channels as it undermines the credibility of the community (which is most likely around knowledge sharing and open discussion). Is the intent to provide a low-cost market research tool to prioritize new product features? Then, perhaps using a simple service like SurveyMonkey may make more sense.

While the community may contribute to all those objectives, and may provide many of those benefits, to be successful—to grow to hundreds of thousands of users—the core purpose of the community must be to engage the audience, offer assistance, and build long-term relationships.

Altruism in business? Not at all. Make no mistake. When done well, the organization’s community can become its most powerful competitive weapon. At the core of a community is customer engagement. It’s an opportunity for the organization to just be “part of the group” (well, only when participation is not overly sales focused). That customer engagement can be viewed as a significant competitive advantage8 is a result of the continued erosion in competitive advantage based on product. Any lead an organization has is quickly eroded by imitation or even by superior technology from competitors. According to James H. McAlexander, John W. Schouten, and Harold F. Koenig in their article “Building Brand Community,” “one way to sidestep this treadmill is to redefine the terms of competitive advantage. Part of the success of brands like Jeep lies in their focus not merely on product or its positioning, but also on the experience of ownership and consumption.”9

Ironically, though, this can only happen when becoming a competitive weapon is not the sole objective in building a community. In order to generate the kind of engagement that may evolve into a competitive advantage, the goal of a community must be a “shared value”—there is value or utility returned to the audience in exchange for participation (as we mentioned in the explanation of F5’s DevCentral, this can be through a variety of mechanisms, including intrinsic and extrinsic rewards). For example, these could include assistance, education, advancement, and ideation in exchange for participation.

Audiences invest in community participation. They pay with their attention, their time, their energy . . . and their concerns. Successful communities reflect that members receive value for their investment, or they may not return, participate, or contribute regularly. Only by assisting, educating, and delighting (maybe solving problems) can we attract and retain loyal and active community participants.

Step Two: Understand the Audience

All the marketing tenets of segmentation and targeting apply to community building. Define an audience that supports the community goal, and build community around a single choice. The goal is to find focus at first and not be everything to everyone.

The site will certainly attract members with varied interests, but trying to build the site to appeal to all audiences makes for a bland, formless, and ultimately unsuccessful community. Back to our example of F5, DevCentral defines itself as a destination for network professionals, whom the community developers fondly describe as the “black T-shirt crowd.” Investors, marketers, managers, and business people are certainly welcome to join DevCentral, but they won’t find much content of interest, or much encouragement to hang around. Topics are usually very technical in nature, with a variety of discussions ranging from video formats to cloud computing infrastructure.

In most communities, participation does not follow the Pareto Principle. Rather than an expected 20 percent of the community providing 80 percent of the participation and interactivity, most communities experience much more varied participation along three primary groups—lurkers, contributors, and creators. According to the most recent “State of Community Management” report by The Community Roundtable,10 the current ratio is 55/30/15, where 55 percent of the community audience is lurking, 30 percent are contributing, and 15 percent are creating. This is a significant improvement over the previous inequality, which measured 90/9/1. (See Figure 16.2.)

Figure 16.2 Community Engagement Profiles

Source: The Community Roundtable 2013 State of Community Management Survey.

You should consider the lurker-participant inequality when determining your audience expectations and keep in mind that there should be no punishment for not contributing or creating. The segmentation of community audience into lurker, contributor, and creator possibly reflects relationship need. Lurkers may simply not want a relationship, but that may only be because they are in a different stage of the buyer’s journey. At any time, a lurker could vault into a contributor and a creator. Still, understanding that you are targeting a broad community is important, but ensuring you make the community attractive and valuable for that select 15 percent while not alienating the other 85 percent will be critical to developing a thriving and useful site.

Communities do support various group discussions, and separate audience segments will naturally align with, and participate in, groups that pique their interests. While it may not make sense to target both marketers and engineers with one community, it is certainly possible to support subgroups interested in different topics, such as in the case of F5, the “black T-shirters” who want to focus on security, performance, applications, and storage topics specifically.

Step Three: Define the Strategy

The community will become the organization’s informal voice to the world, offering an “insider” or “backstage” perspective, and filling in color on the company’s more formal communications such as press releases. Tight coordination is required here to ensure the community managers and organization personnel who manage it have the access and information needed to amplify more formal, structured communication. Timing of the release of information to the community can get tricky with disclosure laws, so often legal departments need to get involved. The ideal situation is to hold virtually instant community update events, timed to coincide with company announcements, so that influential community members are prepared to respond with appropriate comments.

Also, since the community is the informal mouthpiece of the organization, it’s a great place to host blogs. Organizations may want to support multiple blogs, which allow segmentation of topic, author, or audience (examples include a thought-leadership blog, sales/marketing blog, support blog, and product blog). If this is the plan, you will need to determine a few things ahead of time—who will manage them, who will provide product content for them, what are the guidelines for posting, and what is proper etiquette, just to name a few.

Community blogging is a fantastic way to put a face and name on employees (recall in Chapter 14 that one form of credibility, surface, is based on perception of the visible experience, which can include faces of authors), but will require commitment and the establishment of guidelines, education, and some level of oversight. A light hand works well here. Resist the urge to police or compel review if at all possible. Remember that your organization already allows employees to speak with customers. Blogging is just another way to do that. If you cannot trust these same employees to post intelligently to a blog, you are hiring the wrong employees.

Step Four: Architect the Site

When it comes down to architecting your community site, keep one thing in mind—tools help achieve business goals, not the other way around. Many organizations fall prey to the “me-too” trap. For example, they create a Facebook page because everyone else is doing it even though the majority of their audience is on LinkedIn.

Before a line of content is written, or a single video posted, the foundation of the site must be laid out. For example, define the number and purpose of the initial user groups. Of course, to some extent, the software or service chosen to host the site will influence decisions here. Here are questions to ask during the architecture phase:

• Will there be geographic layout with groups by country or region?
• Will there need to be multiple languages?
• Should there be segmentation by topic?
• Will the long-form content (like blogging) be separate from conversation posts within different community channels?
• Will the site be similar in structure to others, making it easier to navigate for those already participating in other communities?
• Is the goal to stand out with an approach that is radically different, at the possible expense of requiring new users to face a learning curve?
• Will we have registration? Remember that some barriers of entry can create exclusivity and be a huge motivating factor for some people.

There are several steps in the design and architecture of the community that can contribute to developing great equality of participation and encourage more active involvement. Here are some examples:

• Elevate content. Use observation technology to mark or rate content as a “hot topic,” so that lurkers contribute just by lurking. Their simple act of reading content contributes to the community and helps build history with those who don’t want to actively engage.
• Make adding information easy. Use forms and other low-impact methods of input.
• Gamification. Rewarding and supporting friendly competition, often by no more than badges, belts, or other insignia, works wonders in driving participation. Be cautious, however, not to offer too much, or make participation at the highest levels too challenging. It’s a very delicate balance between encouraging the loudest voice while also supporting the meekest. The ultimate goal is to have support ready for people as their relationship needs change.
• Quality over quantity. Often, the most thoughtful contributors will not be the most productive or verbose. Encourage and reward useful contributions.
• Divvy up the work. Many hands make light(er) work, and no one person will have the knowledge or the gravitas to attract and engage the community for long. Look for content and topic leaders in unusual locations throughout the organization. Knowledge and interesting stories lie hidden in the most unexpected places. If the organization runs a large research lab, for instance, perhaps the team that cares for the facilities has specialized knowledge that would be of interest to others involved in similar research. Wouldn’t the team down in shipping be a great source for those quirky “opening and unpacking the box” videos? The tradeshow team can offer handheld walk-through videos of the exhibition hall showing visitors exactly how to find the booth.

Step Five: Launch and Market

Getting the initial design on paper, and the first flurry of content loaded in the tool, is just the beginning of a complicated and delicate process. The launch, promotion, care, and feeding of the community are full-time jobs . . . for a small army. It will be critical to have a full-time, focused resource leading social community development. Specialized consultancies are now popping up to offer social community support, but we have found that it is critical to have at least one internal resource dedicated to the community. An insider has more access to internal sources of content, a better sense for organizational strategy, and is enveloped in the organization’s culture.

Community development takes time, commitment, and passion. Initial results are likely to be disappointing if not viewed in a strategic light. Many initial conversations and groups that form in the early days of the community will fade in popularity. Group leaders will need to be replaced, and topics culled and added.

Throughout the process, it will be imperative to maintain executive support, and to return frequently to the original strategy and organizational goals in building the community in the first place. Communication, continuous improvement, and constant reinforcement of the need to develop the community will be required.

Summing It Up

A community is probably as close to a digital equivalent of that old general store as you are going to find. It combines many elements of a physical presence like aisles and benches for conversation, self-service content, and assistance when needed. But there are a lot of considerations that need to be made when not only selecting your community platform, but when identifying the strategic goals, architecting the site, and launching it. Developing a community isn’t something that should be taken lightly . . . and it’s not something that is solved entirely by technology. The engagement that you foster within your community can truly be some of your competitive differentiation, part of an “experience” that consumers have been seeking.

Helpful Takeaways

Not every organization will embrace a community. Many simply won’t be able to wrap their brains (or operations) around the commitment to digital engagement. But for those that believe a community truly represents a virtualized physical presence (without all that Second Life nonsense), we’ve pulled together a few best practices and tips for you. Note that these aren’t in any particular order.

• Don’t start with tools first. Too many organizations fall into the trap of selecting their technology first. Follow the steps. A community is a strategic decision, not a tactical one.
• Assign jobs. You can elevate your “creators” even more by assigning them jobs. Make them channel moderators. Provide and afford them privileges that other community members don’t get.
• Get internal involvement. Your community isn’t built by a few people and left to run itself. A community needs the involvement from all quarters of your business. When you assign community members jobs, assign jobs to internal community advocates as well. Jill from engineering. Sam from accounting. Eric from product development.
• Tell stories. Don’t relegate your community to just conversation. Use it as a jumping-off point for telling stories. Feature stories told by your customers. Remember that your blog can (and should be) a part of your community.

Obviously, organizations have been building communities for a while now. We won’t profess to offer all the best tips and tricks. Here are some resources where you can find more information:

• www.feverbee.com/2013/04/50-community-building-tips.html
• mashable.com/2012/01/25/startup-community-building/
• www.websitemagazine.com/content/blogs/posts/archive/2013/08/16/4-unconventional-community-building-tips-.aspx

Notes

1. http://blog.limelight.com/2013/09/engage/.

2. www.jivesoftware.com/.

3. www.lithium.com/.

4. https://getsatisfaction.com/corp/product/index.php.

5. www.bloomfire.com/.

6. www.boonex.com/dolphin.

7. www.jomsocial.com/.

8. Richard Sedley, “Six Theses on Digital Customer Engagement in a Troubled Economy,” www.slideshare.net/richardsedley/6-theses-digital-customer-engagement-and-the-troubled-economy.

9. James H. McAlexander, John W. Schouten, and Harold F. Koenig, “Building Brand Community,” Journal of Marketing, January 2002, http://oregonstate.edu/bci/sites/default/files/jeep_article.pdf.

10. The Community Roundtable, “The 2013 State of Community Management,” www.communityroundtable.com/research/the-state-of-community-management/the-state-of-community-management-2013/.

11. Samer Faraj, Molly McLure Wasko, and Steven L. Johnson, “The Structure and Processes of Electronic Knowledge Networks,” in Advances in Management Information Systems, Knowledge Management: An Evolutionary View of the Field, ed. I. Becerra-Fernandez and D. Leidner (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2008).