I ran across an interesting blog post from the ubiquitous Chris Brogan I thought I'd share: 19 Presence Management Chores You COULD Do Every Day

Chris titles his approach as "Presence Management", which struck me as odd initially, since it's about reaching out and responding to the community, not about pushing yourself on others. But upon reflection I can see how defining it as a discipline can help - especially for someone like Chris with such a huge following. Putting yourself out there every day is an effort that needs to be performed religiously, which is really what his post is about. And the tips he provides are useful examples of those hundreds of little things that add up over time. Here's a few for reference:

1. Find seven things worth retweeting in your general feed and share.

3. Point out a few people that you admire. It shows your mindset, too.

10. Share at least 3 interesting updates that you find.

13. Drop into Q&A and see if you can volunteer 2-3 answers.

(see the full article for the other 15)

This is one of those areas that is often tough for newcomers to social media to grasp; that it's not about the killer content, the ultimate blog post or your perfect design. Its about the constant stream of little things that keep people connected to you or to your community. Like a snowball rolling downhill and growing larger as it travels, those little connections are the way your members come to know who you are and what your community is about, and grow closer as a result. So be sure to keep in touch, keep it real, and keep it coming!

Are you inside your community, whether its your corporate site, your facebook page or twitter feed, interacting with others and sharing with them? How do they know who you are?

Photo by redjar

Moving is a confusing and anxious experience. It feels like you just got your collection of limited edition Elvis dinner plates mounted on the wall, and now you are packing up boxes, forwarding your mail, and trying to find out where the power outlets are in your new place. It can feel the same way to your members when you move your community to a new platform.

But just as we outgrow the starter apartments we lived in after college, you may decide the community platform you started with no longer meets the needs of your community (or your business). You need to transition to a new site, but you want to bring the best of your community with you - how do you make it work?

In our experience, successful transitions to new community platforms do the following 8 things well:

1. Reconcile goals and objectives: be sure that you understand how the objectives of the new community are different in any way from the old one - even healthy communities' objectives will shift over time with the needs of the organization.
2. Focus on the active membership: Don't try to target everyone, identify and reach out to members who have been active on the site in the last 3-6 months.
3. Recognize members' prior participation: Even if the objectives of the old and new communities are completely different, the reputations that members built in your old community are very valuable to them. Make sure you recognize that value in an equivalent way on your new community, while still giving members room to grow.
4. Have a simple plan for the logistics of moving members: The more complicated it is, the harder it is to execute. A welcoming committee for your community is a good idea in general, and they can be invaluable in helping people through the rough edges of the transition. Prepare them!
5. Communicate the change early and often: Clearly articulate in a positive way why you are making the change and how the members will benefit from it. Then take that message to every channel you have, on multiple occasions, so that members aren't caught by surprise.
6. Bring the most active members in early: Find ways to make your superusers a part of the birthing process of the new community so they can make it their own. Invite them in early to help seed the site for the rest of the members.
7. Listen and respond: While you are reaching out to your members, be sure you have channels open to solicit feedback from them as well. Then acknowledge and respond to their feedback - this does not mean you implement every request, but you need to let members know they are heard.
8. Measure the right things: Define and track what are the relevant success criteria to measure following the transition. As stated above, your new community may be trying to achieve different things than before. Be sure to take into account that direct comparisons may not always be appropriate.

You may have noticed that the majority of these (#2-7) are about your membership, not your content. Its common to get caught up in the details of moving content, but remember that content doesn't make an active community, members do. If you focus your efforts on bringing members over, you can enlist them to help select and bring over the valuable content (see #6).

Moving can be a trying experience for anyone, but sometimes it is necessary in order to grow - so make your move as positive as possible!

Photo by TheMuuj

I've been remiss in reporting back on the Online Community Unconference, so here goes:

This Unconference is without a doubt my favorite conference of the year. There is such a participatory atmosphere there that really gets people engaged and talking on a practical level about the problems we face as online community practitioners. Nowhere else can I so completely step outside of my own experience and still feel that almost everything is relevant to what I do. So with that, here's some thoughts on how it all went:

The Good:

• As I mentioned in my last blog before I went, I did spend more time connecting with others and participating in the sessions of others rather than presenting my own. This helped me personally get more from the conference, but I wonder if that was somewhat oddly selfish of me in retrospect. See more below.
• In a session titled "What Metrics Should be Used to Measure Community Health", Lithium's Community Health Index was called out as the only measurement based on data - everything else was described as a 'black art'.
• Scott Moore was a diva that day, with acclaimed sessions on "Social Psychology 101 for Community Managers", "What is Community Leadership" and an interesting shared session with Gail Ann Williams titled "Are we a Community Too? Ways Community Practitioners Stay Connected. What's next?"

The Less Good:

• While I focused on participating more in other people's groups this time around, I felt like there were gaps in the sessions that I could have addressed, especially with all the good work we are doing here on the Lithosphere. If I am able to go back next year, I will go back to presenting at least one session.
• There was a lot of the same information presented as last year, with a number of returnees expressing frustration that we failed to move the needle on some important topics. I think it was more a frustration on the limits of one-time events than on the conference itself - without some persistence it is tough to keep momentum going.
• No pictures on Flickr.com with Creative Commons licensing for the west coast! UPDATE: Bill Johnston at ForumOne heard and corrected this - Thanks Bill!

The Fun:

• Help people out and you get a bottle of wine. It's that simple.
• Saw quite a few familiar faces, and met some new hires of current Lithium customers!
• Ding dongs, Ho-hos and Twinkies! (Maybe the health-conscious would classify this in the "Less Good" category, but I thought it was fun and helped keep everything from getting too stuffy )

Links:

Pictures: http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=ocu2009

Wiki: http://www.socialtext.net/ocu2009 (authorization required today, was told it will be available to the public in read-only form on Friday, 6/19)

Photo by redplasticmonkey

So in just over 9 hours I'll be at the Online Community Unconference hosted by Forum One Networks. Last year's event was both fun and informative, and I'm interested to see how this year's conference fares in the face of the current economy. But it definitely seemed that that the degree of intimacy was one of the stronger points of last years conference - quite a feat with a attendance of around 250.

The Unconference encourages participation, but looking back on last year I think I tried to do too much. This year I'm planning to take my time and hop around a bit, maybe do some note-taking to help contribute to the conference wiki pages. But as my kindergarten teacher once expressed, "Scott's not afraid to share his opinion with the rest of the class." With the launch of the Lithosphere and everything that's happened since, there's plenty of fun things to share - I'm sure I won't be fading into any backgrounds :smilelywink:

Definitely looking forward to it - look me up if you are there!

Photo by DrBacchus

Right on the heels of last week's news from Redfin on their community success comes the announcement that two more of Lithium's customers have been recognized for their accomplishments: Robert Pearson of Future Shop and Maryellen Abreu of iRobot have both been named Customer Champions by 1to1 Magazine!

Future Shop and iRobot were 2 of the 3 companies specifically recognized for their engagement in social media efforts (the 3rd being Wells Fargo), and their vibrant communites are a testament to their strong commitment to the value of customer relationships. Here's how they are realizing that value:

• iRobot successfully built relationships with superusers on their community, the Robot Lords, and through community feedback they were able to develop a whole new line of products and a new product version specifically for developers.
• Future Shop relies on its community to provide peer support and a "continuous feedback loop to improve the customer experience," according to the 1to1 article. Our recent case study with Future Shop illustrates a whole range of areas that Future Shop's community helps their business, from Customer Support, to Marketing, to Corporate Communications and Recruitment.

It's great to see these champions at iRobot and Future Shop getting some much deserved recognition, and I feel personally very fortunate to count leaders such as these as customers!

Congratulations Maryellen and Robert, and to their entire teams who helped make it happen!

Photo by edwin.11

Unless you've been in a concrete bunker for the last couple of years, it's pretty clear that the real estate market has seen better days (oh and by the way, that bunker is probably worth a lot less now than when you moved in  ). With the one-two punch of decreased demand and shrinking credit available, it's never been a tougher time to buy or sell a home.

That's why it's pretty amazing that Redfin, the real estate industry's first online brokerage for buying and selling homes (and a Lithium customer), announced today that 51% of people who bought a home through Redfin reported that the company's online community influenced their decision to work with the brokerage, an increase from 30% the year prior. You can read the full press release here, but here's a few of the numbers listed for you:

• Visits to Redfin's online community have increased 415% year over year.
• Prior to making a purchase, over 22% of Redfin buyers had posted a question to the community.
• Redfin's revenues have increased by more than 40%, while the company has reduced marketing program expenses 82%.
• Redfin's Net Promoter Score, a measure of customer satisfaction, has increased by 5%.

Revenues up, costs down, customer satisfaction increased. Can you say business value? Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman can:

"Redfin gives consumers four times more information about a listing than most other websites, and thousands of customer reviews of our agents, but this data just sits there without a place for people to discuss it. An open community where anyone can agonize over what to offer on a listing or rant and rave about our service is the key to Redfin's credibility, and the only sustainable way to drive revenues."

The real estate market isn't back, times are tough and customers are harder to come by. In fact, name the industry and that statement is still true in today's tough economy. But smart companies that embrace their customers and find ways to identify and enable their advocates can flourish even in adversity.

So what part of your business are your customers helping you with today?

Photo by Tumanc

I've worked with many companies and their communities and each one has been different. But there is usually a moment during the launch where the team realizes something important that they hadn't before, some new way of looking at communities that puts everything else they've known in perspective. I think of these as the Aha! moments, and you can almost see (or in the case of a teleconference, hear) the light bulbs go on in the client's imaginations when it happens.

Here's a few Aha! moments that I've seen occur more than once:

We aren't writing the content, they are: At the start of an engagement, concerns are typically about what kinds of content to create, and resources needed to generate the content. But once the realization hits home that its not the company's content but the members' contributions which are important, the conversation shifts to talking about the best ways to elicit content from members rather than designing impressive-looking content showcases.

Content is consumable, People are interactive: Communities aren't made of content, they are made of people. While content may serve as a way to get members to the community, what convinces them to post is that someone else is there to talk to. This realization brings with it an awareness of aging and freshness to the consideration of content quality. Once this sinks in, like above, the discussions change from building up repositories of content to growing conversations over time.

Members value interactions with other members: While your participation on the community is expected to some degree (even if it is only to listen), what many members are really looking for when they come to the community is the chance to interact with others like themselves. If all that members wanted was to hear from you, they are typically many other ways they can achieve this today. What really sets a community apart is the ability to speak to their peers.

Community management is as much about looking inside as it is about looking out: Some groups are more familiar with outward-facing tasks with customers, while others are more adept at internally-facing activities within the organization. But whatever your initial focus or skill, there comes a time when the community manager realizes they have to address both areas in order to succeed. This balance and alignment of member needs and business needs is the philosophical core of the community manager role, and this realization is a definite milestone on the road to success.

It is difficult to narrow down why these moments happen and when. They occur at different times and different phases for each customer; some customers arrive having already assimilated many concepts, and others don't truly grasp them until after their launch. But we all have them as we leave the old ways of doing business to embrace this new means of interaction. And I like to think of our role at Lithium as being a facilitator of these Aha! moments, helping our customers to achieve their full potential and transform their business relationships with their clients.

What was your Aha! moment in your community? Does it still color your thinking today?

photo by Maxpipi

Lots happening on the Lithosphere with the new design coming up, so I've been spending a lot of time in another blog recently.

But today I'd like to return to the topic of numbers - specifically, the numbers that matter.

When I was at the Web 2.0 expo at the begining of this month, I had a good opportunity to see what numbers a lot of social media experts and vendors were using to make their case, from numbers of posts, numbers of views, numbers of registrations or even numbers of communities.

And recently there has been a great deal of fuss over the race between Ashton Kutcher and CNN to reach 1,000,000 followers on Twitter, as well as Oprah's entry onto the Twitter scene and what it means.

People are looking at the social media space and still trying to figure out how to keep score, when the real measure of success is the same as it's always been: are the companies engaged in social media using it to improve profits through increased revenue and decreased costs. For vendors, are your products and services doing this better than the others?

So in the spirit of the times, here is a collection of numbers from the Lithium Technologies website I'd like to share:

• Linksys, a division of Cisco, has reduced it's call volume by over 1.4 million calls annually as a result of it's thriving customer support community.
• FICO (formerly Fair Issac), a leading provider of credit scoring, realized a 41% increase in spending by community members after the launch of the myFICO forums.
• Sage North America, part of The Sage Group, has seen a 15-point increase in its customer loyalty score and experienced a 300% increase in participation in ... as a result of the ACT! community.
  

Maybe those numbers help explain why Lithium Technologies is putting up some numbers of its own in this tough economy.

To paraphrase Will Hunting: Do you like numbers? I got ROI - How d'you like them numbers?

Photo by TheBusyBrain

Michael Wu returns for the last installment in his series describing how the new Community Health Index was developed:

We've came a long way. This is the last blog in the series that describes the development of the community health index. Earlier posts in this topic are listed here:

1. From the Brain to Community Analytics
2. Criteria for Creating the Community Health Index
3. Crunching Numbers for the Community Health Index
4. Interpreting the Statistics for CHI

Last time, we talked about the selection of predictive variables, and the tedious process of nonlinear analysis. Once we have the variables and the nonlinearities, we must combine them into a single function, which when evaluated give us the proper health level of a community. But the hard work is not over yet. The result of this process culminated in a health function, which is a product of 6 health factors that are important in determining the health of online communities. These health factors are referred to as:

• Members: the number of registered members over time,
• Content: a function of posts weighted by member and guest viewership,
• Traffic: the number of page views over time taking into account search crawlers,
• Liveliness: a function of the number of posts per board over time taking into account user expectations for engagement
• Interaction: the number of unique participants weighted by the amount of conversation between them within a thread, and
• Responsiveness: A measure of time to respond between successive message posts within a thread taking into account expected response time.

Each of these health factors usually involves one or more metrics with some nonlinear function applied to them.

The health function is smoothed to give the health trend, like smoothing the daily stock price to give a better indication of the underlying direction of movement. The health function is then normalized to remove some of the bias introduced by the size of the community. I did not remove the size bias completely because human experts also have such bias and tend to rate larger communities healthier. The normalization process takes into account of the health history of the community, weighting the recent health more heavily, as well as the volatility of health so that consistent progression of the health trend will result in a greater value of CHI. By design the community health index is constructed to be robust to outliers and also sensitive; if there is a consistent signal for a change in health, it will be reflected in the weekly value of CHI.

The final step of any mathematical modeling is model validation. Basically, this means that we must test the model on a data set that we did not use to build the model, and make sure that the model still performs as expected. Lithium now hosts roughly 170 communities, and I developed the community health index using data derived from 16 communities of varying size, age, and purpose, where we have plenty of non-metric data. Then I tested the resulting model in 4 other communities. As with any scientific discovery process, this went through several iteration before the model begin to perform well during all the stages of the modeling process. Once the model predicted health start matching those assessed by human experts, I computed CHI for all our communities and gathered more data to refine the initial formulation. The computation published in our white paper is actually the result of three iterations of major reformulation; each introduces just a few minor but important tweaks that increase the prediction accuracy of community health for a greater variety of communities. And we are already working on future refinements as we continue to learn from the data we collect.

Hopefully this series of blogs have given you a peek at the development process behind the community health index and the effort that went into it. If you have any questions I'd be more than happy to address them in the comments, or feel free to ask me on Twitter at mich8elwu.

Photo by LaertesCTB

In a last minute change of plans, I had the good fortune to attend the Web 2.0 Expo as part of the Lithium booth team on Thursday morning! It was actually my first time in the Lithium booth on the expo floor and it was definitely exciting. Web 2.0 is a great conference, with a good mix of industries, sizes, and needs. I talked with large, global corporations, mom n' pop shops, and everything in between - from high-technology to media, manufacturing to retail, as well as government and non-profit organizations. If there were any lingering questions about whether Web 2.0 has hit the mainstream, I think that can be safely put to rest.

I had an absolute blast in the trenches, barking for the Lithium roadshow to all comers. There's still quite a few folks out there trying to make sense of what is increasingly a complicated mix of technologies and services, and there was more than one overwhelmed person I saw asking "Yeah, but - what's in it for me?" I hope I gave them some good solutions!

Sadly, due to the "last minute" part I didn't have much time to spend in the panels and sessions this go around. But hopefully those of you that attended were able to see our own Neil Beam, Manjeera Patnaikuni and Michael Wu making the rounds (two of whom have appeared previously on this blog).

A special treat: here's a wonderful interview on Lithium with my boss, Iain Grant, that aired on KRON 4 news Sunday:

Courtesy of KRON4 News:  2009 Web 2.0 Expo Coverage

Were you there? Let me know what you thought, particularly about what I missed on the upper floors!

Thanks to jaycross for posting the pic of the Lithium booth on Flickr (and for using Creative Commons licensing)!