Customer Communities

Avoiding the customer community graveyard

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Customer Communities, Marketing Musings

Online customer communities are all the rage these days. One doesn’t have to look very far to see a Facebook or Twitter page rife with customers chattering back and forth, providing valuable word of mouth advertising without the cost of big media buys. However, for every Comcast and Ford, there’s a graveyard of communities that never get off the ground. The scenario goes something like this:

  • Step 1: Enterprise 2.0 savvy marketer gets buy-in from boss on a customer community.
  • Step 2: Enterprise 2.0 savvy marketer builds community using the newest, latest cool online tool – something with lots of vowels in its name.
  • Step 3: Enterprise 2.0 savvy marketer invites customer community to visit the online site.
  • Step 4: and then nothing happens…

Well, the boss complains about a failed project, but that’s likely not the desired result. When it comes to online communities, the argument of nature vs. nurture is irrelevant. If you lock five people in a room for a period of time, those persons have no choice but to interact. In the online world, there’s always something else vying your communities’ eyeballs.

You can do everything right in planning your community, but without ongoing management, marketing, and maintenance, you set yourself up for a lone spike in traffic, and that’s it. As much as organizations want customer feedback, customers also want a reason to come back to the community. You don’t have to create elaborate content to keep users returning, but you will need to maintain an ongoing presence that speaks to the needs of your customer base.

This maintenance should be as much a part of the community plan as setting up the goals and choosing your initial customer targets, and resources should be allocated accordingly. Plan for ongoing content creation, and remember that even if you intend to be the key point of engagement for your community, your time is not free. In most cases, a successful customer community has a dedicated community manager that can focus on community promotion, content creation, community monitoring, and reporting. A dedicated community manager can help you build a stronger relationship between your company and your customers.

At Projectline, we love nothing more than creating spaces for the voice of the customer to ring loud and clear. We can help you build and grow a community where your customers can share their experiences, learn from your leadership, and provide much-needed feedback for strategic planning. When run correctly, these communities can also increase customer loyalty and positive word of mouth.

Take Something, Leave Something: Why online communities need a little love

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Customer Communities, Marketing Musings

Take Something, Leave Something The individual components of this antique typesetter's drawer contains nick-knacks; this and that's. If you see something you desire, please feel free to take something, and leave something in its place.

This past weekend, we decided to get out of the city and head to Mount Rainier for a few days of computer-free downtime. We stayed at a cabin whose décor ranged from modern (the flatscreen TV for movie-watching) to rustic (vintage skis). But the centerpiece of the living room, hanging just above the small dining table, was an antique typesetters’ box with a small sign above it.

It occurred to us that the typesetters’ box is a fitting analogy for online communities and the myth of user generated content. Ideally, each visitor would bring something interesting to the box—an oddly-shaped key, a silly figurine, a tiny picture—and take something equally interesting. But, looking at the box’s collection of odds and ends, it was clear that’s not how it played out. Instead, people had taken the things they found interesting and left whatever they had on hand. What did they have on hand? Mostly wine corks, bottle caps, and regular old trash. This knick-knack collection needed a curator—just as online communities need guidance from a manager or two.

What would make it work and continue to have great content?

  • A little warning: let people know before they arrive that they should bring something worth sharing. For the first go, this is a little tricky, but online communities are likely to see repeat visitors. If they see great content being contributed by other users, they’ll want to come back with something to share in return. I’ve seen this most vividly on Tumblr and (in the old days…) LiveJournal, where the quality of your networks’ content is a challenge as well as a treat.
  • A little cleanup: drop by every so often to tidy things up. Clean out the trash, whether it’s irrelevant or spammy comments. Cull the repetitive stuff, whether that means ineffective re-hash or accidental double-posting. Of course, in communities, it’s often verboten to delete simply low-value content, but just cleaning up the mistakes and spam helps raise expectations so people are a little less inclined to leave their trash.
  • A little bit of love: if you care about the community, you’re going to need to help out occasionally by refilling it with the really good stuff, so that people have something to come back for. If it’s a knick-knack box, this might just mean bringing a few tiny figurines and a seashell. If it’s a community, this could mean engaging an expert blogger to write an article or logging in every day to thank the highest-value contributors. It could even mean making a video yourself or asking around to see if any of your partners are willing to share their best presentations with the community.

What does it all come down to? User-generated content isn’t magic. It’s not going to create itself, and it may not even curate itself particularly well—especially on a small scale. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth pursuing, it just means you’ll need to participate. And if you do, the reward is an interesting, constantly changing place, worth visiting again and again.

Need more help with the care and curating of customer communities? Let us know – we’d love to help.

Launching a New Community: An Interview with Navigating Cancer’s Community Manager

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Customer Communities, Marketing Musings

Customer communities and health care are a natural fit—we need connections most when we’re dealing with complicated, scary things. Whether for care providers or for patients, online resources can provide support, perspective, and knowledge to help manage treatment.

A new health community is launching today that aims to do exactly that: Navigating Cancer, a Seattle-based company, will offer information, tools, and connections to support users’ journeys through diagnosis and treatment. We got a chance to sit down with (or at least email with) Marika Burkhart, Navigating Cancer’s Community Manager.

What skills have you found are most important as a community manager?

Good communication skills, empathy; being flexible but consistent. An online community finds its own voice – as a community manager, it’s my job to witness, facilitate, and support that voice.

What has been the biggest challenge so far in launching a new community at Navigating Cancer?

Keeping people happy from beta to launch is no small task; they have to stick with you through bugs, error pages, and website changes. Luckily, we have a loyal community – along with an amazing group of engineers who make technical miracles happen every day.

Starting a new online community from scratch is obviously difficult; what have you found to be most effective in bringing people into the community as participants?

Highlighting the practicality (and differences) of our website has been key. We offer more than just online emotional support – patients can create and manage a secure patient health record, keep a daily record of their well being and side effects, and create summary reports that can be shared with their healthcare team. The community has responded positively to these features and have spread the word of their own volition. That’s an ideal way to build a community: through positive feedback and word-of-mouth recommendations.

How is the Navigating Cancer community moderated or guided? How do you maintain a balance between positivity and open speech, or does the community regulate itself?

The community connects with each other through Groups, Discussions, and Shared Experiences. Our community managers are there to answer questions, introduce topics, join discussions, and provide site support to our patients and their supporters. As more people join, we’ll have a better idea of how to regulate as the site is shaped by participants. As always, staying open to feedback and being willing to implement changes will be instrumental in the growth of our community.

What are you most excited about and most worried about as you see it launch?

I’m excited about: seeing the community unfold and surprises along the way. I’m worried about: surprises along the way!

Marika is a veteran blogger with experience in the client service industry, community development, and social media.

Pass it along: sharing, filtering, engaging

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Customer Communities, Marketing Musings, Social Media

Last weekend, as I wandered through the farmer’s market, I discovered a storefront I’d never been inside before. Just inside the door was a gorgeous display; of course, I pulled out my phone to take a picture. As soon as I got the picture, a man rushed over to me and asked me—brusquely, but politely—to please ask before taking pictures. “Of course!” I said, “I can delete it right away! So sorry.” He assured me that I needn’t delete it and explained they’d had trouble with people copying some of the designs for sale. I asked for a business card, apologized for my thoughtlessness, and left (with permission to post the picture).

The experience of being personally chided for the very possibility that I might steal designs without giving credit reminded me of the recent etiquette and culture debates I’ve seen on Tumblr, Twitter, and Delicious (the 3 networks I’m most active in personally). It feels like everyone is worried about attribution. As things get easier to pass around and pass along, our reputations (as organizations and individuals) depend on what we share as much as what we create.

Interestingly, this can also offer a new model of customer engagement. Newsweek, for instance, has a Tumblr blog that links to Newsweek and external content, provides an easy way for readers to share Newsweek articles, and—last but not least—enables Newsweek to reblog readers’ best content and suggestions. On websites and traditional blogs (like this one), user-generated content is often relegated to the wilds of comment sections or discussion boards. Newsweek’s Tumblr interacts with users as equals (while maintaining order through careful curation). Suddenly, an organization that seemed faceless and one-sided is a potential reader or partner in conversation; to me, this seems like the very heart of customer engagement.

Pop quiz:

  • What kind of attribution do you expect from your network?
  • What makes you trust re-tweets (RT), reblogs, or links? What makes something worth passing along?
  • How do you think Twitter’s new RT feature (currently in limited rollout) will affect attribution and engagement?

Why the new FTC Guides are good for you (we promise).

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Customer Communities, Customer Evidence, Marketing Musings, Social Media

In about a month, the FTC’s new Guides for using endorsements and testimonials in advertising will go into effect (read the press release or the full text in PDF). It can be easy to get sidetracked by a narrow understanding of endorsements, but these guidelines have implications for all kinds of marketers.

So, what’s the big deal? How will this affect customer engagement marketers?

(Keep in mind: we’re not lawyers, and we’re not giving you legal advice.)

  • The new Guides throw out the old loophole that let advertisers get away with putting a cursory disclaimer next to an exaggerated claim (i.e. “Results not typical”). They stress that one way to avoid implying typicality is by providing the details of the situation—we think the best way to do that is a thorough, detailed case study!
  • The revisions explicitly address new and social media, stressing that “consumers’ willingness to trust social media depends on the ability of those media to retain their credibility as reliable sources of information” (see page 11). Arguing for transparency and honesty, they make clear that both advertisers and endorsers can be liable for obfuscation or dishonesty.
  • The Guides expand potential liability to the endorser, which makes sense in the context of blogs and customer communities. The key to avoiding the pitfalls of consumer-generated endorsement-confusion? Clear policies and processes.

So, are the new guidelines good or bad?

Of course, there are some tricky things about the Guides. You’ll want to make sure you have someone monitoring or managing your social media presence, blogs about your products, and customer communities. You’ll need to double-check that you have solid processes in place for reviewing and approving consumer-generated content. You’ll have to make sure that final editorial pass has legal and ethical issues in mind.

But ultimately, we think the revisions are pretty great. Social media, testimonials, and customer stories are only as powerful as the trust between companies and their clients. The FTC’s choice to weigh in (relatively) early, rather than in a few years, is only a good thing for those of us who know the real value of customers’ trust.