1. Intimately know your customers:  Really get to know the customers the community will potentially serve.  Leverage in-depth interviews in addition to surveys.  What do customers need?  What problems do they have?  What communities do they belong to and how do they participate?  What do they like and not like about those communities?  Ask how a community sponsored by your company can enhance their experience.  Don’t overlook asking customers if they even want to participate in a community sponsored by your brand.  Ask customers their opinions about what role should the brand play in the community.  We have found customers typically expect the brand to play an active role – it’s a matter of how active.  Is there an interest a large group of your customers share that can be leveraged as the foundation for bringing together a community?  Conduct a conversation audit to know what consumers are saying about your brand online.  Leverage this listening data to anticipate the types of conversations that will occur in your community
2. Define the target audience:  Based on customer research, which customers will benefit from community the most?  Will the community serve different types of customers?  Are certain customers the focus of key business objectives?  Map this out on a whiteboard to understand all the options and determine where to focus the community.  Once the target audience is defined, figure out how to best reach this audience and the type of community it prefers.
3. Connect community to specific and timely business objectives:  This seems like a no-brainer.  Still, so many businesses are blinded by ‘all of our competitors have a community.’  The community is mistaken as the end when it is really the means to an end.  What are business objectives and what type of customers are the focus?
4. Review competitive communities:  Determine what communities already exist that target a similar audience and solve for a similar problem.  Join these communities if possible to assess their strengths and weaknesses.  Determine how your community will differentiate.
5. Build to solve both a customer and brand problem:  Branded communities are the bridge between customers and organizations.  Communities have to serve the needs of both in order to survive.  What are the unmet needs of customers?  What are the biggest challenges for the business?  Where do customer issues and businesses challenges intersect?  What problems can a community realistically solve for?  What processes need to be in place to support the community is solving these problems?  For example, a community to gather customer feedback on products and services without the feedback loop and processes to support the business in acting on this feedback will turn into a branded community of haters.
6. Design for desired behaviors: Many companies make the mistake of launching a community out-of-box before thinking through the desired customer behaviors the platform features need to support in order to achieve business objectives.  A good exercise I recently conducted with a brand is to outline in detail the required community features and functionality based on customer preferences and the online behaviors we wanted to see exhibited in the community.  For example, if you want the community to persuade customers to buy more product, how will the platform encourage and enable this behavior?  If you want the community to promote word of mouth, how will the platform support sharing within and outside of the community?  How will these sharing behaviors be tracked?  Launching a community with all the bells and whistles without a plan for how the features and functionality should be used is a recipe for failure.  Customers will not use the tools without guidance for what to do and what’s in it for them.
7. Develop a measurement plan:  What are key performance indicators for the community?  What are the community health metrics?  How will these measures prove achievement of business objectives?  Are there dependencies on other groups and websites for measuring success?  For example, how will you integrate web analytics to know where community members go when they leave the site?   How often will you analyze and report on these metrics?  Will the community reporting be incorporated into a larger customer analytics dashboard?
8. Create a content plan:  Community is about its members, but great content is what it takes to attract them and keep them coming back.  Creating engaging content can be the biggest challenge for brands.  This is mainly because companies put the community manager in charge of creating content.  Community content creation should not be taken lightly.  It’s a huge task to constantly create new content for a community and get it approved by Compliance – one best assigned to a person or team that already specializes in content creation.  (Tip: Content creation can be outsourced.)  The content plan needs to define the purpose, tone of voice, style and formats for community content.
9. Plan for promotion:  How will you promote the launch of the community and attract your target audience to the site?  Think through all possible channels, both on and offline, to socialize the existence of the community.
10. Sell the community internally to garner support:  Customer communities require the support of the entire organization.  No one can predict exactly what a customer will say or do here.  It’s safe to say customers will post a complaint or ask for help – issues that the community manager cannot and should not handle alone.  It’s best to gain buy-in from other internal groups and educate them on the commitment of time needed to support the community before it launches.  A major component to selling the community internally is learning to speak the language of each external group approached to support initiative.  The community sponsor should translate how the community will help achieve the goals of other departments. We recommend enterprises create a community task force that includes a representative from Marketing, PR, Research, Analytics, Content/Production, Customer Service, Legal, Compliance, IT, and even from Agencies or Consultancies involved in customer initiatives.  (Tip: Meet with Legal as soon as possible because this is where most of the community project delays occur.)
11. Determine the platform provider:  Picking the platform provider to host the community should be one of the last things you do in the planning process.  While most of the providers appear to support similar features and functionality on paper, how they support these features and functionality is what differentiates them.  Will you consider an open source solution or use a full-service, third-party provider? Do certain providers have more experience serving clients in your vertical industry?  Do certain vendors have a culture and style you prefer?  Do certain vendor platforms require more costly customization to meet your needs than others?
12. Scope the business requirements:  The community sponsor needs to take the time to think through all of the business requirements to support the community.  Define the FTE staffing model, internal processes and workflows, professional services, and technology required to support the community at its various stages.
13. Forecast the budget required to build and sustain community:  The budget includes technology platform costs (setup and ongoing maintenance), technology systems integrations costs (e.g., single sign-on, CRM integrations), FTE people and agency costs, content costs, marketing and advertising costs (to promote community), and more.  To understand the ROI of community, the sponsor needs to meticulously track exactly how much budget is allocated to support such an initiative.

Disclaimer: There are a million different details to planning for a customer community not included here.  This is a high-level outline for how we approach building a business case for a customer community.

During his SXSW Interactive presentation, Jared Spool entertained with audience with classic examples of web design fail.  The audience enjoyed a good laugh in judging poor web design examples based on the final product.  But after the ice breaker, Spool challenged the audience to think about all of the decisions a designer made that led to that final design style.  The most insightful part of the presentation was Spool’s reference to his research at User Interface Engineering about what separates successful from unsuccessful companies as it relates to designing user experiences.  Spool entered the research project with the hypothesis that successful companies would have the best design methodologies.  He left the research project with vastly different findings.  The results showed that the most successful companies actually lacked methodology while the ‘struggling’ companies were the ones trying to put methodologies in place.

Spool rationalized the results stating that methodology is a systematic, repeatable approach to a process based on following specific set of rules.  He found that design rules did not work for designers.  According to Spool, rule-based decisions prevent thinking.  With rules, designers appeared to fall apart when faced with an exception.  Designers of the successful companies were on the opposite side of the spectrum (shown below) in that they relied on tricks and techniques.  In the case of successful companies, designers were left to their own devices to make informed decisions rather than follow hard and fast rules.

Source: Jared Spool, Anatomy of a Design Decision, SXSWi 2011 featured speaker presentation.  Posted on Twitter by @kennethkunz from Yfrog.

Spool’s dissection of design decisions applies to what we refer to at Dachis Group as social business design.  Successful companies trust and empower all employees to make informed decisions, not force them to follow strict, top-down methodology and dogma.  Dave Gray’s The Connected Company blog post points to research supporting this concept.

“It’s not about design for control so much as design for emergence. You can’t control a complex system, but you can manage its growth, and there are a lot of things you can do that will position it for success…Design by connection is not a top-down activity so much as bottom-up. Complex systems just don’t work that way. In a complex system, you need to pay attention to small things and make little adjustments along the way.” Dave Gray, The Connected Company, 2011.

During our recent Social Business Summit, John Hagel explained how the problem businesses face in today’s information age is that current knowledge is diminishing in value at an accelerating pace.  Knowledge workers need to constantly refresh knowledge stocks.  Businesses can no longer rely on competing with one piece of proprietary knowledge. Businesses must participate in a larger marketplace of information exchange to maintain a competitive edge.

According to Hagel, the key to a successful business is “small moves, smartly done” that lead to a cascade of change.  If we apply Spool’s teachings, we discover that each of these small moves are a result of many smaller decisions.  The insight that emerges is the most seemingly unimportant decisions lead to small moves that combined over time have a huge impact (good or bad) on business.  So I’ll make a leap in making the following statement:

What separates a successful business from an unsuccessful business is how it supports the millions of decisions its employees make.

There’s compelling evidence for companies to trust employees’ workarounds on established methodologies to solve business problems.  If you don’t trust your employees to make informed decisions, you need to look more closely at your hiring practices and training programs.  Trusting, supporting and empowering employees to make their own informed decisions is the most powerful way for the enterprise to scale operations and allow for the flexibility and innovation required to be competitive. Design for open business cultures, ones that are networked to support the sharing of employee expertise and learned techniques at scale.

As an organization’s front line leaders in driving, curating and managing conversations about the brand, community managers hold a unique and critical position in social business. Day-in and day-out they are exposed to unedited conversations about every aspect of the company, from its offerings, brand, and customer experience to competitors and the overall public perceptions of trends in the marketplace where the company plays. Unlike other public-facing staff in a business that may only have isolated or limited exposure to customers around a specific need such as sales or support, the community manager is immersed in the endless flow of customer and influencer dialog that has become prevalent on the social web. This puts the community manager in a position to be one of the first to identify leveraged or unexpected outcomes from social business activities as well as identify potential fires while they are still just sparks.

The relatively new role of community manager has become business critical in today’s dynamic business environment.  Those who have begun to establish best practices for interacting daily across an expanse of forums and issues deserve a resounding “thank you” today as we celebrate the second annual Community Manager Appreciation Day.  

Community Management and Social Business

For businesses to extract real, measurable value from a community, the community has to be integrated into the business and the business has to be both willing and able to collaborate with the community. This level of collaboration and integration does not happen on its own. While organic process of community is essential, it’s important for the business to acknowledge that a live person connecting the dots between external and internal audiences improves the experience for both. Most community efforts that fail do so because the community is treated as an island or an initiative off on its own. This approach only frustrates community members who perceive the community and company as one but cannot get an answer about a product or service via the community. It frustrates executives who paid for a community, but have yet to understand the broader impact it has on the business. Bridging corporate and community agendas in a way that satisfies all constituents is key to what a community manager does. It’s new territory to be in the middle and, as Blaise Grimes-Viort puts it, no easy task.

“…you often find yourself stuck between a rock and a hard place. On one hand, you are bringing in community opinion to people who often would rather not hear or act on it. On the other, you are trying to maintain an equilibrium within your community, all the while standing by the company line which may not be a publicly agreeable one.  The community might be happy, but the company isn’t, and vice versa. All the while, you are serving two masters with little recognition of your daily actions and successes, and continuous pressure.”

Source: http://blaisegv.com/community-management/5-ways-your-community-manager-is-the-glue-of-your-organisation/, March 2010.

Successful Community Managers Bring Diverse Skills to the Table

As you begin to solidify the role of community manager in your organization and define an approach to staffing it, be sure to take into account the critical position a community manager plays. Community managers are the connectors between information, ideas and people for your business. They learn first-hand about community member attitudes and preferences related to your business, therefore generating key insights that should be integrated into the overall business strategy. These tasks require a skilled and experienced staff member with a strong instinct for crafting communications within a rapidly-changing context. They must be agile, resourceful, and empowered.  Dion Hinchcliffe has created one of the best graphics to illustrate how community managers are the “jack of all trades.”

Data Supports the Efficacy of a Good Community Manager

Tom Humbarger is one of the few to gather actual data to support the critical need for a community manager. Tom compared health metrics for a community before and after the budget was cut for a community manager position. Without a community manager, Tom observed that membership growth slowed significantly, a fall-off of more than 63% on a week-to-week basis. Additionally, the number of community visits dropped 60%, number of pages viewed per visit drops 22%, and time on site decreased by 33%.

Three Reasons to Hug Your Community Manager Today

Community managers tell us that their work is largely very rewarding, but being the face of the community daily is an extreme position and a bit of reinforcement goes a long way. As you consider why you should give your community managers special thanks today, consider the following:

1. Community Managers Are Your Sherpa Guides. The difference between what even the best weekly report can tell you versus what a community manager knows about your brand is the difference between looking at a map versus hiring a local guide. Community managers absorb an incredible amount of information about your customers and fans by interacting with them on a daily basis in a genuine, organic way.
2. The Best Firefighters Are Local. When a crisis breaks out, you’ll probably hear about it from your community manager first. And when it comes time to formulate a response, your community manager is your best asset, because they’ve been a part of the community all along. They’re not an outsider coming in to deliver a message because they have to; they’re a trusted source of information with an existing relationship with the core members of your community.
3. Community Managers Put a Face with the Brand. Community managers receive a plethora of messages from users who are delighted that they’re able to directly contact a real person who responds in a timely manner (which is often uncharacteristic for large brands). The fact that customers are able to consistently contact a dedicated representative establishes trust and loyalty with the brand, and makes the customer feel like their needs and suggestions are actually being noticed by the brand.

Don’t Wait Until Next Year to Appreciate Your Community Manager Again

As with any other business-critical professional position, you want to let your best players know that their work is not only appreciated but important. Take time regularly to thank your community managers and promote them in your organization. The results will benefit every constituent in the business and help drive those emergent and leveraged outcomes we’re all searching for.

Special thanks to Jeremiah Owyang who established every fourth Monday of January to be Community Manager Appreciation Day.  This year events are taking place all over the world to honor community managers.  Dachis Group will be participating in the Boston and Austin events this evening.  Follow the related #CMAD conversations on Twitter.

Community dashboards are not unlike treadmill dashboards.  Both provide metrics as indicators of health.  The treadmill provides this with heart rate and calories burned.  The community platform provides this with number of active members, content contributors, etc. Dashboard metrics don’t lie, but they don’t tell the whole story. The treadmill does not factor calories consumed that day, hours slept, etc., just as community dashboards do not track off-site attitudes and behaviors of community members. Community managers can be blinded by the ease with which these numbers are provided by the dashboard and forget to track other important metrics. That’s why it is important that a measurement plan is developed in tandem with community strategy, not in reaction to the metrics generated by the community platform.

For companies launching marketing communities, I recommend the following measurement approach:

1. Start with the goals of the community

• Establish a measurement plan based on focused goals for the community.  Is the goal conversion, customer retention, sentiment, etc.?
• Avoid the trap of borrowing metrics from other marketing initiatives because they are familiar.

2. Identify the desired community behaviors to prove these goals and the associated platforms tracking these behaviors

• Think broadly about desired community member behaviors (online and offline) that have implications for desired community outcomes.
• Tracking these behaviors typically means pulling data from multiple sources including the community dashboard, web analytics platform, social media monitoring service, URL shortening service, CRM system as well as community member surveys.
• Collaborating with colleagues from your analytics, customer insights, customer service, and IT departments will help you make sense of all of these data stacks.

3. Consider all initiatives that support community success

• Keep in mind all of the paid and earned media initiatives (e.g., promotions and referrals) that will contribute to community success and consider integrating the associated metrics into a community scorecard.

4. Select the best metrics to tell the story of community progress

• Now that you have considered all of the possible metrics for proving desired community outcomes, refocus the measurement plan with the right balance of metrics that tell the story.  That might translate to three key metrics to support each community goal, for example.

5. Establish a baseline

• Determine if the metrics that are part of your community measurement plan were collected historically, or if you need to establish a baseline.  Do not establish specific numbered goals (e.g., 15% increase in positive sentiment) without knowing the baseline from which you are working.  Otherwise, you risk setting unrealistic goals.

6. Set specific targets to stay focused while allowing for some flexibility

• Once you establish a baseline, set specific (realistic) monthly and quarterly targets to serve as motivators to keep you focused on your goals.
• Maintain a flexible approach to your measurement plan as you discover what works and what doesn’t work for reporting purposes.

Capturing a holistic picture of community health and progress requires a tremendous amount of planning and integration.  Community dashboards provide only a piece of the puzzle.  This is why the marketer’s role involves both art and science.

A research project I conducted last month indicates that many investor relations professionals are not leveraging social media because they lack the following:

1. Clear corporate guidelines that address the disclosure of financial information and IR participation
2. People, processes and technology to support IR participation
3. Understanding of how social media adds value to investor communication given the required investment of time and resources

The need for clear corporate guidelines

Interest in leveraging social channels by IR is constrained by the perceived risks of violating the disclosure process regulated by the SEC.  Although the SEC has issued guidelines to recognize ‘interactive websites’ (i.e., corporate blogs or forums) as sufficient channels for public disclosure, the language citing the conditions these websites have to meet to fulfill the requirement remains vague and outdated to know how it will be enforced. The SEC first introduced Regulation Fair Disclosure in 2000 to prevent selective disclosure of material information that would lead to the benefit of only the few who were informed.  The new regulation required companies to publicly announce material information in a way that would be broadly disseminated.  In 2008, the SEC provided additional guidelines to include interactive websites as an acceptable channel for this information.  We have included an excerpt from the 2008 Regulation Fair Disclosure update below:

“Thus, in evaluating whether information is public for purposes of our guidance, companies must consider whether and when: (1) a company web site is a recognized channel of distribution, (2) posting of information on a company web site disseminates the information in a manner making it available to the securities marketplace in general, and (3) there has been a reasonable waiting period for investors and the market to react to the posted information.”

Additionally, the 2008 guidelines state that a company (or employee acting on behalf of the company) is responsible for all statements he or she makes on these ‘interactive websites,’ but a company is not responsible for the comments made by third parties on its website.

To be fair, the SEC guidelines are not preventing investor relations professionals from leveraging social media.  It’s more the fear of how to leverage such an unregulated and uncontrollable medium in a regulated and controlled environment. The perceived risks put Legal departments on edge, and many investor relations see the task of incorporating social media into reporting practice an uphill battle until the SEC or company executives provide greater guidance.  In my experience working with clients in regulated industries, I have found the combination of social media policy and training to be the most effective way to encourage participation.

The need of supporting infrastructure

Most investor relations departments do not have the people, processes and technology in place to support the use of social media specifically for influencer and investor communications. Furthermore, no investor relations professionals I interviewed last month report having dedicated budget for social media.  Investor relations budgets are primarily dedicated today for funding website upgrades, annual reports, road shows and conferences. Therefore, investor-related messages promoted via social channels are driven by Corporate Communications/PR most of the time – as this is the department who is responsible for maintaining and managing the corporate social media account.

The potential issue with this arrangement long-term is that investor relations remains one step removed from the conversation by relying on Corporate Communications/PR to disseminate and respond to messages in social channels.  This seems like a recipe for investor-related messages that sound more like broadcasts rather than authentic conversations. This arrangement also poses challenges to synchronizing investor-related messages across all websites.  There are clear signs of departmental divide.  A recent IR Web Report audit of 200 investor relations websites showed that 90% of them still ignore corporate presence on social media, even when other sections of the corporate website promote these channels.

The need to know the added value

According to the BNY Mellon survey, IROs are split as to whether social media even offers value.  Social media fosters conversation but most investor-related social messages are written as broadcast announcements that point back to the IR website for more information.  Therefore, most investor relations professionals are trying to figure out what additional value these messages offer to investors who have been trained for years to visit the corporate website for the most accurate and up-to-date information.  The issue is that value has to be defined by each IR department, but most IR departments are not involved in corporate social media participation to know what type of returns to expect.  If the goal of each investor-related social media message is to drive traffic back to the IR website, for example, then this activity has to be tracked, measured and reported back to IR for them to understand the value. The coordination of these activities is challenged when IR is not involved in the message creation and dissemination process.

I recommend that investor relations professionals seeking to incorporate social media into future reporting practices follow the five steps outlined in the graphic below to figure how to get started in social.

In my experience, I find that taking the time to thoroughly research the external and internal social media landscape as well as define participation guidelines and goals provides a solid foundation from which to build a successful social participation program.

Back in April, Peter Kim and I encouraged advertisers to wait until more information was released about Twitter’s new ad platform before jumping on the Promoted Tweets bandwagon.  We advised brands to find success with regular tweets (the basics) before diving into Promoted Tweets – a new hybrid of paid and earned media.  Since that time we have observed how bleeding edge brands like Virgin America and Coca Cola have experienced off-the-charts social media engagement with Promoted Trends, a new advertising concept Twitter began testing back in June as an extension of the Promoted Tweets platform.  Promoted Trends are topics already trending on Twitter (meeting a minimum level of popularity) that advertising partners can link their Promoted Tweet to, which guarantees greater visibility and reach for brands.

The fast and fleeting stream of social micro-messages on Twitter adds complexity for advertisers and marketers.  Such a real-time advertising market is hard for traditional organizations to respond to effectively as well. Those businesses that are up to the challenge and are serious about adapting and up-leveling their processes can reap significant rewards. That’s because Twitter is now one of the largest and most engaged social ecosystems online today.

According to Twitter, 100 million tweets are now sent out each day.  It is much more difficult to tap into a dynamic signal on Twitter these days with so many people, organizations and businesses (160 million) on the platform competing for attention.  For this reason, we think Promoted Trends is a viable solution for brands seeking for their messages to stand out in the crowd. Early evidence bears this out as Frank Reed recently noted, with both Promoted Tweets and Trends doing well with big brands.  The new challenge is that the crowd, not the brand, determines which tweet is promoted.  And the Promoted Tweet must associate the brand with a topic already trending on the site. More interestingly, the dynamic and unpredictable nature of the medium means that high value advertising trends can occur which fewer advertisers will chase, creating opportunities for both value and opportunity.

Source: http://www.trendistic.com, September 23, 2010.

During the first two stages of the new ad platform rollout, Promoted Tweets are linked to site searching behaviors.  Twitter experiences dramatic spikes in searches related to popular real world events according to Dick Costolo, Twitter’s COO (update: now CEO) who briefed Dion Hinchcliffe and I during Web 2.0 in San Francisco 2010.  According to Costolo, ‘popular events’ include TV shows and sports games as Twitter emerges as a media consumption channel.  A recent study that examines how people tweet about TV validates the frequency of the behavior in addition to Twitter’s decision to include video within the user stream of the new interface.  A month after our briefing, Coca Cola became the first case study of extraordinary success in linking a Promoted Tweet with the WorldCup hashtag (#WC2010).  Other early brands leveraging Promoted Tweets containing popular keywords are boasting 50 to 300 percent lift in engagement.

During these early stages of Twitter’s new ad platform, Promoted Trends appears to be the low hanging fruit for advertisers and marketers seeking for their messages to resonate on Twitter.  Promoted Trends remains novel, so there is less risk of user fatigue and avoidance.  Plus, the Promoted Tweet is linked to a topic already starting to trend among users.  Knowing this, we were surprised no brands leveraged Promoted Trends when Justin Bieber hit the stage in a varsity jacket during the VMAs starting a spike in three trending topics – #justinbieber #VMAs and #varsity_jacket.  (We’re half joking about this.)

The Real Challenge: Adapting to a New Advertising Model

We suspect many advertisers and marketers aren’t ready for real-time advertising, lacking the organizational structure (people and technology) and processes to support ongoing listening for these kinds of ad hoc opportunities, rapid creation of content and campaign execution.  Promoted Trends presents a limited window of opportunity that only a few brands will capture at first.  This requires the ability to execute fast, willingness to take well-calculated risks (no long-term planning or testing), and skill for carefully and strategically listening to the Twittersphere.  That’s asking a lot for so many brands still working to master the basics of Twitter engagement.

For now, here are our five steps we recommend for social business organizations seeking to climb the real-time advertising maturity curve:

1. Prepare for trending social advertising opportunities. Analyze and define what advertising opportunities you are looking for. Develop a database of desired trends mapped to associated advertising, developed in advance whenever possible (which it won’t always be when unexpected yet important trends emerge in Twitter and elsewhere.) Allocating a cyclical budget for real-time ads will also be crucial yet difficult by their unpredictable nature. Create a decision making process to decide when to pull the trigger based on cost and anticipated ROI.
2. Establish a trend monitoring capability. Again, while Twitter will be the primary focus for many the same goes for any social networking platform, or social media monitoring/listening/analytics platform that can provide this information. Connect this stream of information to your real-time advertising decision making process.
3. Learn how to manage real-time campaigns. A lot of what you learned from monitoring traditional online advertising still applies and so will some of the tools. Where real-time is different is in the need for situational awareness so that underperforming real-time advertising collateral can be quickly detected and tweaked. So too with watching and capitalizing on the cross-over of the advertising into social media so that proactive steps can be made to trigger viral behavior and distribution. Finally, and probably most importantly, social media advertising at its best is about genuine engagement. Have staff ready to quickly onboard into your real-time advertising efforts to support engagement with customers as they ask questions and make statements in the social mediums that require response. It’s those that are engaging that need the two-way response to fully drive the desired end result in any social media campaign. This is even more true of the real-time advertising model.
4. Assess and triage the results. Creating a scoring model and collect post-trend event data and rate how the campaign performed both within the real-time advertising system as well as the cross-over into all other social media channels. Use this to quickly learn what works and what doesn’t, as well as its overall value to the organization.
5. Instilling change in the advertising/marketing process. The Internet develops powerful new capabilities faster than most organizations can readily absorb them. Advertisers and marketers will take several years at least to properly digest and incorporate real-time advertising models like Promoted Trends. In order to take the very first steps down this path means that change champions must clearly articulate both the whys and hows of real-time social media advertising. Create clear messages about how your organization needs to transform its thinking both strategically and operationally as it looks at taking on these new advertising opportunities. Articulating the expected value is also essential to establish the staff and budget you’ll need to support real-time advertising. We find that proactive change management greatly improves the pace of adaptation to new social business models in general. Instilling needed organizational change must and should be an integral part of your real-time social media advertising strategy.

Are you planning to explore real-time advertising like Promoted Trends? Why or why not?

We spent months conducting research, planning the strategy, establishing the KPIs and measurement plan, creating content and designing the site.  Now that we are weeks away from launch, community planning has suddenly become tracking a growing ‘to do’ list.  Instead of ‘call the caterer, meet with the photographer, email the DJ,’ my list includes ‘email Compliance, call Legal, follow-up with IT’ in addition to daily communication with our client partner and platform provider.  The ‘to do’ list scrolls in my head creating what one of my friends referred to as the [wedding] planning head fog.  The stress hits when you realize one incomplete item on the list will throw off the entire schedule.  This is why each time I mark something complete on the list, I feel compelled to do a little dance in my chair.  Each checked item means we are closer to launch.  It’s exciting.

However, it can also be wearisome.  I’ve been exposed the darker side of community planning as well.  A community planner who has invested lots of time and energy into planning the community may also grow easily frustrated and impatient over details.  (‘How did they miss this important request?’) 

I confess that I came close to turning into the bridezilla of community management.  This image became the stress-relief joke among the team as we plotted how to get everything approved in time for the targeted launch date.  ‘Did you go bridezilla on them?’ we would ask each other.  When things got particularly tense, there was a strong temptation to ‘go bridezilla.’  But in the end, keeping a cool head prevails and we’re right on track for launch.

To avoid turning into bridezilla before launching an online community, I offer 7 lessons learned from my experience so far.

1. Meet with Compliance and Legal during the initial planning stages to provide context around the project, give notice about content approvals, find out if training is available (goodwill effort that goes a long way) and if Terms of Service language exists for social media sites
2. Conduct interviews with other groups inside and outside the organization that interact with your target audience (PR, Customer Service)
3. Don’t assume that Facebook-like features will be supported by every community platform
4. Allow for plenty of time to receive approval of a new community manager position and to find the right candidate
5. Avoid ghost-written blog posts (they are awkward and no one wants to endorse before the community is launched anyway)
6. Allow at least a week for website quality assurance testing (you may need more time depending on how many people need to be involved and their responsiveness)
7. Schedule time to pre-seed the community site with user-generated content before launch to kick-start sharing activities

I’m sure I’ll have more to add in the future.  For now, I’d like to know if you have any lessons learned in community planning to add.

Source for bridezilla photo: http://pdbb.wordpress.com/2009/04/08/bridezilla/bridezilla/

The concept of a strong center has interesting applications outside of dance. A strong center maintains connectedness across disparate parts. Dachis Group has observed one of the major frustrations of large companies is the fragmented state of social – each department going out on its own, developing different social tactics, using different social technologies – all guided by different principles and no common strategy. Each department is like arms and legs moving wildly out of sync in different directions. This decentralized structure lacks the important connections between systems that leads to an intelligent network. At some point, the stress and strain of uncoordinated social systems will cause the organization to flail – like a dancer attempting multiple turns without ensuring arms and legs are aligned and coordinated with the central body.

At first it may seem to go against everything social represents to centralize social. The power of social is in the ability to scale the sharing of information without anyone owning or controlling it. What I have learned in my work with clients is that centralizing corporate social strategy, policy and training does not mean social is owned or controlled. Instead, centralizing governance means creating a solid command center to lead the organization and help connect the dots. The edge of the organization can therefore operate with autonomy but still maintain connection and coordination with other parts. Otherwise, the brand is at-risk for social chaos:

• social intelligence is siloed which prevents a centralized view of the customer (internal)
• fragmented experiences and mixed messaging confuses and frustrates customers (external)

While the goal of social business is to distribute social responsibility for scale, the organization starts to flail if it doesn’t operate from a strong center. This social center, also known as the social business center of excellence (SBCE), is a cross-functional team that guides innovation, strategy, policy and training for the organization. The SBCE consists of representatives from each department who come together to collaborate on corporate vision, strategy, policy and training so that ownership is shared and distributed across the organization, not owned or controlled by a particular department.

Below is a visual of how a social center governs while empowering the edge of the organization to take accountability and responsibility for executing.

So many of us are eager to dive into social tactics. The forward motion of execution feels good. Conducting an audit of properties and initiatives, answering the ‘why,’ establishing charters and policies feels like we’re standing still. We resist standing still under the pressures from executives to move the needle and report the results. But taking time to establish a strong center is what’s going to allow large companies to manage multiple moving parts in a way that provides more momentum and power to support the desired results.

Take a look at how your organization is structured for social business. Do you have a social center guiding and coordinating the edge?

During the same week of learning this strength about myself, I discovered this strength in a total stranger. She works as a shift supervisor at Starbucks in Austin, Texas (where Dachis Group headquarters is based). Chances were greater that we would meet in-person during one of my 4pm coffee runs, but we met via Facebook first.

The notification arrived before I even realized my wallet was missing. I had made a Starbucks run with a colleague earlier that afternoon and in the chaos of sugar, cream and conversation, I left my wallet at the store. My wallet did not include any identification with a telephone number.  The Starbucks shift supervisor noticing the credit cards and cash (I had just recently visited the ATM), decided to immediately look me up and contact with me via Facebook. When I met her at the counter to retrieve my wallet she explained how she too had recently experienced the nightmare of losing her wallet. We connected.

I doubt that Starbucks trains employees to service in-store customers this way on Facebook, but it is evident that making a commitment to increase points of connections with customers is a big part of the company’s culture.  Facebook enabled the shift supervisor to contact me when she had no other means than the mailing address on my license. The shift supervisor could have kept the wallet until I connected the dots about what happened (which I could have, as it is also a strength) and returned to the store. Of course, that would most likely be proceeded by the anxious discovery that the wallet was missing at the moment I needed it and a frantic retracing of steps in my head of where I could I have left it. The shift supervisor saved me this emotional energy by making the extra effort to search for me on Facebook and send me a message immediately.

So what does this really have to do with customer service?  It has everything to do with me – the customer. I feel more connected to that particular Starbucks location and I feel safe shopping there. Although Starbucks coffee is available at the hotel where I typically stay in Austin, I made a mental note of wanting to give this Starbucks my business, even if it means walking an extra street block. Someone there cared about me and I will reciprocate.

While this story has nothing to do with innovative social CRM strategy, it has everything to do with how a social savvy shift supervisor connected the dots and leveraged Facebook to send a high impact signal to a customer. To the shift supervisor, it was a no-brainer.  While social technology can automate and innovate many processes, I still believe it is the human behind the technology that makes best-in-class customer service. To that end, connectedness is a quality I would recommend Starbucks preserving and nurturing at the front lines.

What are your thoughts? Do you believe connectedness is an important quality for customer service?

So how does a business determine what it should and should not outsource when it comes to social media? I believe Joe Raasch of Target says it well.

Joe’s comment was one of 41 responses to the question “should you outsource social media” posted on LinkedIn by brand strategist Valeria Maltoni this past March.  Valeria published a great post featuring these responses on her blog Conversation Agent.  Many respondents agreed social media application development, content development, monitoring, and measurement activities could be outsourced.  These are activities that are more transactional to Joe’s point.  My colleague Peter Fasano puts it another way by saying social media functions that can be clearly defined are possible to outsource.  For example, a business can leverage third party services to scan the Web and help filter and flag comments about its brand by defining the inquiries.  A business should not rely on a third party to respond to comments before it can carefully define appropriate responses.  The exercise of scripting appropriate responses to hypothetical comments is often fruitless just as you cannot script one side of a real-time conversation before it takes place.  Some companies develop intricate scripts and then realize the responses do not work in the real world.  That means a business must establish clear guidelines on when and how to respond.  Guidelines do not prevent the sponsoring organization from being present to manage escalation from third parties.  The question remains as to whether or not organizations that choose to outsource due to lack of resources will be able to support and enforce these guidelines externally.

Why outsource?

Businesses consider outsourcing social media functions because they lack the expertise in-house.  Outsourcing social media functions could help a business buy the time it needs to develop these core competencies in-house.  In this case, outsourcing can be a viable option, especially if the business partners with the agency for education and training.  However, if a company can find a way to keep social media functions in-house, I recommend doing so given the potential risks involved.

Potential Risks to Outsourcing Social Media

• social conversations feel less authentic and trustworthy
• business has less direct oversight to be flexible in strategic approach
• agency not equipped to answer customer questions given its limited access to important business intelligence to make decisions
• business process continuity is challenged leading to delayed response times
• agency loses sight of core business values and objectives driving social participation (we see examples of this even within a business)
• customers grow frustrated because they want to talk directly to the business

A business can minimize potential risks by carefully choosing which functions are outsourced.  The general rule to is to avoid outsourcing participation and engagement.

What Can Be Outsourced

• recruitment
• social web monitoring
• moderation (filtering for inappropriate comments or curating the best)
• social web analytics
• content development
• application development

What Should Not Be Outsourced

• listening (you need to be listening to know the context for how to respond)
• responding
• driving conversations
• mediating member discussions
• content management

Possible Exceptions

Companies like Communispace and Passenger have created successful models around outsourcing customer insights communities.  Customer insight communities are easier to manage because they are private, members are pre-screened and many community activities are defined in advance.

Remaining Problem

My biggest concern with outsourcing social media functions is that it suggests these activities are not core to the business.  If a business has not made the case for investing in social initiatives, outsourcing will add new challenges to making this argument.  Outsourcing social media functions puts social media at risk for becoming a separate, siloed business activity which prevents the integration of customer participation into all aspects of the business – a critical move to realizing the full value of social business.  Our clients that have experienced success in social media treat their communities as business assets.

Social media initiatives require the investment of resources no matter what, so why not make the right investments in-house to maximize the return?