Interestingly, after I posted my article last week on why limiting participation in your community is detrimental to achieving ROI, an article comes out over at Internet Evolution titled "Online Communities: Private vs. Public". There's some good quotes in the article from our CEO, Lyle Fong and from the CEO of Passenger, a company that's chosen a completely different direction than us when it comes to online communities. And it does an effective job of outlining the key differences between the private and public approaches. But in choosing to highlight the differences, I think it leaves the reader with a false choice. After all, just because a community is public, doesn't mean that everything in that community is exclusively public.

In a public community you can create private areas that are either invitation-only or that members can earn access to through certain behaviors. The difference is that when you grant folks access to these areas, you already know them and the way they participate due to their previous activity. Within that private area, you can engage much more closely with the vetted audience in whatever way is most appropriate for you objectives. And because the entire community is public, you are able to cast a much wider net for the audience that you want to try to attract.

Contrast this with an exclusively private community, where you invite a much smaller number of members that you want to join, and then hope they will come and participate in ways that you want. Not only do you have to get any potential members over that initial barrier to join in the first place, which is harder to do when the content and activity which is their motivation to join is not visible. But limiting participation also shifts the problem from finding productive members to trying to change the behavior of existing participants, which experience shows is a much harder thing to do.

The public vs.. private debate is a good one to be aware of, but be sure it doesn't take you to an either/or proposition that can limit your success.

Photo by by star5112

Proving ROI can be difficult for marketing and brand loyalty initiatives, and communities focusing on these kinds of objectives aren't any different. After all, it can be almost impossible to separate out all the many things that influence customer's decisions. How much of a customer's purchase is that 30-second ad on TV or radio really responsible for?

To address this question, advertisers on broadcast media will often try to implement some kind of controlled testing or staggered roll out to isolate the influence of their campaign from other factors. And for campaigns composed of limited bursts of content like traditional media this can be an effective strategy. But as the media mix and the frequency of interactions increases, this becomes harder and harder to disentangle.

Particularly for online communities and other ongoing social media, control and testing methodologies are ineffective and even dangerous to apply. Dangerous, because the attempt to isolate and control factors such as audience size and duration can actually be detrimental to building a thriving community of members, which prevents you from achieving your objectives. Alastair Ray talks about the problems of measuring integrated campaigns in an article on thinkbox.tv titled simply "Return on Investment":

"And with the rise of the integrated campaign where all media work together and often run at the same time that is making evaluation of the different elements including TV more difficult... And while the consensus is that integrated campaigns are indeed more powerful than non-integrated ones it’s vitally important to ensure the evaluation doesn’t distort the communications plan it’s designed to assess."

He was speaking of integrated marketing campaigns across multiple media, but I would argue that this applies to any ongoing program or initiative where factors are difficult to isolate. Or as Jeremy Griffiths, Effectiveness Director at MediaCom was quoted in the same article: '“We tend to avoid compromising the plan simply for the ability to get a better measurement of it.” 

It can be hard to prove a true causal relationship between community and objectives like increased purchases. After all, it may be that the people most likely to buy are the ones who are most likely to join a community (so community membership alone won't indicate a true cause of increased purchases among those members in that case). And if you are trying to influence not only the highly visible and active members of a community but the silent majority of passive participants as well, this makes the measurement even harder. So if time and control methodologies don't work well for measuring community success, what should marketers do to validate their investments?

I haven't seen an easy easy answer to this question yet. The most rigorous methodologies today are ones that use statistical analysis to measure both the likely impact of your particular campaign, and what would have occurred had you done nothing at all (factoring in the downward pressure of your competitors efforts). But that level of detailed analysis often requires expertise and resources that today's leaner marketing departments may not have access to.

A effective compromise solution we've seen employed is to baseline the current behavior of existing customers, then track how their behavior changes (if it does) once they join the community, according to the objectives you are trying to achieve. You can also capture data on awareness trends and qualitative anecdotes after the community has been deployed to help describe what changes you are seeing and why they occur.

Finally, be sure that you understand exactly what it is that your are trying to achieve, and make sure you are gathering data that will measure this appropriately. Look closer at what additional value you are expecting from community members - perhaps instead of measuring the increase in purchases for the most active members, the greater value may be that the most active members are affecting the purchases of others on the community. Using web analytics, you might then track who is viewing this content and whether this ultimately ends in a lead generating activity or even a purchase.

Ultimately, rigorous study and evaluation of enterprise community performance are good things for your business. You just want to make sure that you are not limiting your chances of success for the sake of measurement.

photo by timsamoff

Earlier this month I had the pleasure of interviewing Laura, (Laura on the Future Shop Community and LauraB on the Lithosphere) who is the Social Community Specialist at Future Shop and the community manager of the Future Shop Community.

Future Shop has held a number of successful live events with their customers, which they extended into their online community for further dialog and discussion. And despite the hectic holiday retail season, Laura was kind enough to take a quick break from her busy schedule to answer a few questions about events for us here:

Scott: Hi again, Laura, thanks once more for your time today. Before we dive into events, could you tell us a bit about how you started with online communities and social media?

Laura: I've been with Future Shop managing the Community for just over a year now.  I got involved with online communities while in University - my school was the first to launch an Online Learning Community for its co-op program.  I became involved first as a regular member, then took on a more active role in member engagement, promotions and writing while working for the department.

Scott: I've seen some live chats you held on the Future Shop community in the past, like the recent Discussion on the Future of Computing. Can you tell us a little bit about how these events came about?

Laura: The first Live Chat was held in 2007 as part of the Community launch.  Since then, we've had a few more, with the most recent being the Discussion on the Future of Computing. We wanted to do a Community event around the Back to School season that would help our members and customers better understand the technology that we sell.   Our community motto is "Connect. Share. Learn.", so bringing experts into our Community to do just that made perfect sense.  We actually ran two events on this topic - one in English and one in French (we're a Canadian company and have two separate communities for each of our official languages).  Being that we are Future Shop, it made sense to hold a chat around what sort of technologies will be coming out from some of the industry's leading computer companies.  We had reps from Microsoft, HP and D-Link, a discussion panel moderator, a video crew, a whole team of Product Experts and ConnectPro support descend upon the Toronto and Montreal stores to make these events happen.  I stayed back in Vancouver and managed to set up of the online portion while everyone else made sure that the stage and location of the video was all set.

Scott: How did moderating a live event differ from how you moderate the rest of your community? Did you need to bring on any more resources to make it happen?

Laura: We sure did.  Hosting a video live chat event of this size takes weeks of planning and a whole team of people to pull it off.  In terms of moderation, we had the regular "official" coverage from our moderator team to manage the regular boards, plus we selected several Home Office Product Experts from the stores we were filming in and trained them as moderators on the live chat tool.  These PEs were responsible for screening and answering questions submitted by the online audience and filtering up some good discussion topics to the panel.  The discussion panel was able to address several questions submitted by the Community, while the Product Experts were able to provide advice and insight for all the others.

Scott: How did you determine if the event was successful? Were there both business benefits and benefits to your community?

Laura: The immediate benefits would be that it generates a buzz amongst Community Members.  It also attracts a whole new set of members who join because they hear about the event, then find out about the Community.  We're able to offer our Community access to a group of people (in this case industry experts) who they would otherwise never be able to interact with.   Long term, it's not necessarily tied to the number of computers we sold on the day of the event because someone watched this video.  These sorts of events create a connection between our customers and Future Shop.  The same with the Community, it's no longer just a static ad that they see, but they are able to interact with us and ask questions.

Scott: I also noticed you are running a board on the site for questions during the holidays, the Holiday Help Centre. How does this kind of event differ from the live chat? How is it the same?

Laura: These are two very different things.  The live chat is a one-time live event that requires a great deal of planning to pull off as it is "live" and leverages the live chat tool and a whole team of event organizers.  The Holiday Help Centre came about based on our learnings from last year's holiday season.  It's not so much an "event", but a resource that will live there temporarily.  We saw a huge spike in registration and participation during the holidays last year as thousands of people signed up to get advice on what gifts to buy, what the holiday return policies were, what time we opened for Boxing Day, etc.  These questions were scattered throughout the Community and mostly landed on the Off Topic board - but they weren't Off Topic questions, there was just no place to put them!  So this year I created a board and an FAQ based on some of the questions we received last year in the community.  It's just a better way to manage the type of questions that are coming in at this time of year.   It gives people a place to go to talk about what is most important to them.

Scott: Do you have any advice for other community managers who may be planning an event of their own?

Laura: Get feedback from your community before, during and after!  I always try to include them in every important decision to make sure that there aren't any surprises along the way.  Make sure to have a clear objective - be able to clearly communicate the goal of the event and how it will contribute to making your community a better place for your members.   And make sure you are promoting the event!

Scott: What topics would you like to hear about from others in the community?

Laura: I'm always interested to hear what others are doing around rewards and recognition and superuser engagement.

Scott: Thanks so much Laura!

Feel free to post your questions here in the comments, or if you have any ideas for other interview topics you'd like to see. Or feel free to post your questions in the forums to see what your peers have to say about events!

Microphone photo by hiddedevries

Josh Bernoff recently released a study headlined "People don't trust company blogs. What you should do about it." that has a lot of people talking about the relevance of corporate blogs and how they can be improved. A worthwhile counterpoint to the article is from Max Kalehoff at AttentionMax if you are interested in following the discussion.

I can see how this might be an interesting question for debate, but I wonder just how useful this information ultimately is. You could change the question to whether people trust companies and corporations, and you would likely get a similar result. Does that mean companies should try harder to get people to trust them? Of course, but I also think that conclusion is missing the real opportunity.

For me, these survey results boil down to something we should have known all along: People trust their peers more than they trust companies. So instead of working to make everyone in the world trust you, wouldn't it be more productive to earn the trust of the more vocal peers (the super users) and then help them advocate on your behalf?

Let's call this the basic community advocacy strategy:

1. Find the most vocal and influential peers
2. Embrace them and earn their trust
3. Provide more ways for them to talk about you and influence others

Blogs are a useful tool in this strategy, but you are facing an uphill battle if your measure of success is to gain everyone's trust (or even the trust of a majority of your readers according to the Forrester survey). Don't spread your efforts so thin, focus instead on what will have the greatest effect: building relationships with those influential peers to reach the broader audience.

It's not how many people trust you, it's who trusts you that ultimately counts.

photo by greefus groinks

There is a school of thought in social media which believes that communities cannot be made, they are only discovered. On the other side, some folks believe that you can build it and they will come. The answer probably exists somewhere in the middle.

Of course, we at Lithium are in the business of helping companies build a community around their products or services. Leaving aside the argument about whether these are communities that were 'made' or 'discovered', there has been a recurring outcry from some folks in the social media scene against the soundness of this strategy. "Fish where the fish are" is a common refrain to companies considering the build vs.. join decision, and I'd be the first to agree this is very sound advice. But I'd argue that this isn't really an factor against building a community site of your own for two reasons:

First, there's nothing to prevent you from building a community site of your own and reaching out to groups in other places; in fact, it should be a key part of your outreach strategy.

Second, and more importantly, chances are good that your customers visit your company site today with some frequency for a number of reasons: support, product news and updates, etc. If these folks aren't the core of your new community, who is?

Sometimes you don't need to go very far to find the fish: it's quite possible they may be swimming in a lake in your own backyard.

photo by libookperson