I feel a bit out of place here because this is Scott’s domain, but since he’s out of town on business this week – and off on vacation next week – he’s left it to me to welcome everyone to the “new” Lithosphere.

So welcome, everyone!

Come on in and kick the tires. Better yet, open the hood and poke around a bit. You can even ask questions and I’ll make sure to get the answers from the folks who have ‘em.

 

Quite frankly, I’m like the substitute teacher who lets the class talk quietly among themselves while he reads a book at the desk.  Needless to say there will be no homework and no detention while Scott's away.

 

As the substitute teacher, I’m not even sure of all the new features and functionality of this new design – but I do know one thing: This sure looks cool!

Let's see what he's got here in his notes ... Scott wants me to tell you all that while the intent of this new look and feel is to push the envelope of community design and demonstrate what can be done with the new tools available in the platform -- that this is by no means a finished product.

“Our vision has always been that the Lithosphere should shift over time as we achieve some of our objectives and start to focus on others,” Scott said.

“In many ways, a big part of the new platform introduced in the Winter '09 release is increased flexibility in what can be done, and we fully intent to take advantage of that over time! But as we experiment, we will be looking to all of you Lithospherians to provide us with the feedback we need so we can improve!”

So, on behalf of Scott and the entire Lithium team, welcome to the new Lithosphere!  Please take some notes as you explore our new home and let us know what you like, what you’d like to see, and what we can improve.

 

Oh, and I'm fresh out of hall passes. Sorry.

For companies (brands), Twitter isn't a replacement to existing communication channels.

 

It is, however, an additional channel.

 

I think of Twitter as a news ticker (like those annoying streams of text headlines scrolling on the bottom of your TV screen during the morning news). For brands, it's a way of driving traffic to specific content on their websites -- or a specific call for action.

 

People interested in your brand will follow your company on Twitter. If you're a B2B or B2C company, you could use Twitter to call attention to a new product, a new blog post, an interesting discussion in the forums, etc.

 

Why bother with Twitter? 

 

1.  Most folks don't think to check your site every day. 

2. Email is not always effective at providing information -- particularly eNewsletters.  Most marketers know that email open rates are generally around 12-20% and CTRs are 2-5%.  Plus, you have to take some action for email (even if it's to delete it); whereas the Twitter feeds just jam on by.

 

Given the massive growth rates, chances are becoming higher each day that your customer is on Twitter (and Facebook) every day (or at least a few times a week). 

 

So Twitter is an "onramp" to your community.  I suppose you could think of "tweets" as billboards along the highway. When someone sees something that catches their eye, they follow the link in your tweet.

 

If you're a store, say a supermarket (Kroger, Safeway, etc.) or a clothier (The Gap), for instance, you could use Twitter to call attention to a sale or you could "tweet out" an online coupon. Another onramp.

 

Comcast uses Twitter to connect with customers to strengthen the brand and escalate issues to support as part of the company's social media monitoring and response program. Some recent tweets:

 

@annaonthemoon Can we look into it for you?

@peteskomoroch757 The modem was connected and responding properly to me. Pings looked good. I did reset it. What lights are on modem?

@kekil Is the modem new or used? If used could be registered in different area. You may need to call to have set up, should be easy

 

Motorola's Developer Program uses Twitter to connect with members, informing them on a wide variety of topics. Some recent "tweets" include:

 

• 5 Mobile Development Headaches by Mike Riley at Dr. Dobb's Portal - http://twurl.nl/6ddu1n
• great mtg at the Silicon Valley Android Developers Meetup. could on only stay for first two presos on AdMob and Flurry. http://ow.ly/3JhB
• talking about customer service & mobile apps on http://blogtalkradio.com/mo... #android

 

Both Comcast and Motorola don't just use Twitter to broadcast, they also use it to listen -- and when appropriate, to then respond. And quite frankly they are typical of Lithium's customers: always exploring and learning. Twitter is just another tool.

 

How are you using Twitter? And is your company using it? Or thinking of using it?

 

Discuss!

(And let's connect on Twitter. I'm "Dieds.")

Interview with Mike Hardy, Community Manager - Pitney Bowes

 

Bio: Mike Hardy manages eCommerce development at Pitney Bowes and is the creator and community manager of their user forum, which launched in May 2008. Prior to joining Pitney Bowes, Mike created and produced large media and software projects for major educational publishers.

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Tom: Your background focuses primarily in the education space. Was creating the user community at Pitney Bowes your first foray into social media?

 

Mike: I've actually been involved with forums since the early ‘80s. By 1988, I was the host of a conference on "The Well."  My first forum experiences (then called a BBS), were by way of a 300-baud modem in an Osborne Portable Computer. It was the world's first portable computer, though it looked more like a portable sewing machine with a 5-inch screen!  

 

Note from Tom: (The Well describes itself as "the primordial ooze where the online community movement was born - where Howard Rheingold first coined the term ‘virtual community.''")

Tom: What did you learn from your previous life that is helping you now?

Mike: Well, my role here is bigger than the forums. I also manage part of the Web development team. But in terms of the forums, I'd say that my experience managing a myriad of creative projects with virtual or remote groups over the years made me feel immediately comfortable interacting with customers on the forums.

Tom: Did you join Pitney Bowes specifically to build an online community? Or was this something you identified the need for once you got there? 

Mike: I joined the company in 2007 as a Web development manager. At that time an online community wasn't on anyone's radar. However, management mandated that we do a better job of engaging with customers and at the same time make the Web a more central part of the entire customer experience. So it wasn't long before I realized that community and forums should play an important part in meeting these objectives.

Tom: What was the process like from going to identifying the need for a community, to actually launching it? What sort of timeline was involved? 

Mike: We moved fast - a little more than two months. We started looking for a community platform vendor in January with the goal of having another support channel well before the big postal rate change happened on May 12, 2008. When the USPS changes rates, everyone with a Pitney Bowes meter has to contact us one way or another to get the new rates into their machine.

 

To give you some idea, in 2007 we had 417,000 support phone calls about the rate change. So our initial charter was to get some forums up there where we could do what we had to in order to answer those questions fast - and at the same time deflect calls because others with the same questions would find the answers there.

Tom: So call deflections played into your ROI model?

Mike: Absolutely. Call deflections were our ROI model at that early stage. It took under two weeks to pay for the entire year of maintaining the forums. That's the sort of savings we saw in call deflections alone.

Tom: What about the other 50 weeks of the year? How do you maintain momentum within the community after the rate change period?

 

Mike: That was something we encountered -- and learned from - that first year. The onslaught of questions related to "How do I get these rates into my meter?" are like the snake swallowing the pig: Once they got the answers, they didn't come back. Our task at that time was to figure out how to maintain discussions on other topics and encourage customers to start engaging with one another on various mailstream topics.

Tom: How did you do that?

Mike: We experimented. For a B2B company, we focused on the bread-and-butter issues: Postal regulations and costs associated with doing business. We are positioned as the foremost experts on postal information. So we parleyed that into features and discussions people needed to do business. This also helped build Pitney Bowes as the go-to brand for postal info and related expertise and best practices.

 

One area we identified was the need for "Ask the Expert" special forums - forum events where a Pitney Bowes expert hosts a weeklong discussion on a specific topic of interest. These events generate enormous buzz within the community, as customers discover new solutions, perspectives, and other community members with similar interests.

 

The experts are on for about a week, and prior to the event we push out e-mail promotions to portions of our mailing list. They are enormously successful. We see between 10 to 20 times our usual traffic for these events

 

Another beneficiary of "Ask the Expert" events is our knowledge base. We get a treasure trove of information from the discussions.

Tom: On a related note to your KB story, a big missed opportunity in many online communities is customer-driven innovation - identifying new products and services, or making existing products and services even better. What are you doing on this front?

 

Mike: We launched a "Think Tank" forum where customers can post and vote for ideas about our products and services. Management reviews these ideas, plus other customer insights gained from the community, during a monthly executive steering committee meeting.

 

We also learn a lot of subtle things from the customers on the forums that actually get put into practice but are transparent. For example, we learned how to improve customer support. In one instance, this involved learning that we'd apparently been talking about our equipment and processes in "code language" that customers just didn't understand.

 

One topic was: "How to change your presets."  To us this obviously answered the common question:  "How do I update the rates on my meter?" But customers didn't make the connection. The term "presets" meant nothing to them. So from that we learned how to better communicate with our customers - we were now speaking their language.  

Tom: You mentioned call deflection ... what other benefits have you identified from your peer-to-peer support community?

Mike: SEO. The forum is a fantastic generator of organic search back to your domains. During last year's rate change, for instance, a Google search of USPS rates listed our forum second only to the postal service itself. This benefited the forum and also helped generate traffic to our entire site... that is something I hadn't seen coming.

Tom: What advice do you have for companies looking to launch an online community?

Mike: Start at the top - get management buyoff early. I'd also recommend a community manager and, since ours is a B2B community, a customer service rep who is assigned to make sure the answers provided by others are accurate and then get those solutions into the KB.

Tom: We learn from our mistakes. What are the top three mistakes you made in launching your community that others could learn from?

Mike: We started with too many topics and categories. As a result, even though there were conversations going -- since things were spread so thin not enough people joined in. It was the empty restaurant syndrome. If no one is in there, who wants to go in?

 

We also had a rocky road at first in dealing with negativity. I had two conflicting impulses: keep my hands off and let the community handle it and get the negative comments out of sight as fast as possible. Going too far in either direction can be a problem. Learning to find the balance was a challenge. It took about six weeks for me to start feeling comfortable ... lots of help from Joe and our moderator, Andy, helped. We were talking every day at that point.


Tom: Thanks very much, Mike! It was a pleasure speaking with you today. To hear more from Mike, check out the recent webcast held on 4/9/2009 on lowering support costs while improving the customer experience with online communities.